


The Human Condition

by ncfan



Category: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick, Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, M/M, mature themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-04-28 01:42:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5073079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone knew what androids were: a source of labor, an oddity, a testament to mankind’s technological innovation. And when they escaped their corporate overlords, they were a menace society would not tolerate. Two and a half years ago, Natori Shuuichi took work as a bounty hunter, his whole job being to track down and terminate escaped androids. Funny how the job had turned out to be nothing like what he expected…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is an idea I’ve had in my head for close to three months now, but work, other projects and general exhaustion have side-tracked me from finishing the first chapter of this story until now. Because horrible exorcists really is the thing I’ve had the most inspiration for in a long time, this is an AU of them set to the tone of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a science-fiction novel written by Philip K. Dick. DADoES is the tale of androids who escape from their corporate overlords and of the bounty hunters who track them down and kill them for a living. I wrote this story partly because I liked the idea of writing Natori and Matoba in this setting, and partly because I wanted to address some things that I felt like the original novel had not handled particularly well (Though I am to understand that the film adaptation, Blade Runner, which I have never seen, handles said things a little better). I can’t tell you what those things are right now, since that would be giving away plot-relevant information, but all will be revealed when I’ve finished writing and posting the story. There will be three chapters; the other two will probably be the same length or a couple thousand words longer than this one.
> 
> I have tried to the best of my ability to write this fic so that you wouldn’t have to have read DADoES or have seen Blade Runner to understand what’s going on. None of the characters from the book make an appearance in this fic, and aside from the general premise, the only concept from the book that makes its way here is the Voight-Kampff test. It should be accessible for people who haven’t read the book; at least, I certainly hope it is.
> 
> Characterization is… Once again, characterization is hard for me in an AU, though this is somewhat less radically AU than the Star Wars AU. I feel like I got Matoba down a bit better than Natori this time, but they could both be fine and this is just me stressing out like I always do; I dunno.
> 
> As an aside, I am aware that androids (as in robot androids, not android phones) exist in this world. I am aware that their development is taking a different trajectory in the real world than is described in my fic. I don’t imagine the world of this fic as being the inevitable future of ours—I certainly wouldn’t want it to be.
> 
> Finally, a warning. The themes I am touching on in this story are Not Nice. Androids in the original book were essentially slaves (though I don’t think anyone in the book ever called this out), and they are in this fic as well. They are not considered human, they are not afforded any rights by law, and any who escape are under most circumstances killed. This is my first time trying to write something with such weighty themes, and though I will try my best and my hardest, as to how well I execute the themes of the story, well, we’ll see.
> 
> Hope you all enjoy this!

It was a generally accepted fact that when mankind found a new source of labor, they would exploit it for all it was worth. Maybe not immediately, but given enough time, they would.

The android was first created in the name of scientific progress. It was a crude thing, to be sure, betraying its mechanical origins with every jerky, laborious step, with every blink of its eyes, every silent movement of the mouth that couldn’t form words with any more sophistication than that of your typical toddler. But that was only the first generation. The next was more sophisticated, and the next, and the next. Mankind wanted to be able to look into an android’s face and see themselves reflected there, and not gears and wires.

As soon as a model sophisticated enough to perform manual labor was created, that was what they were set to do. Androids were no longer to be made for science’s sake alone, but to take the burden of dangerous, unforgiving work from the shoulders of mankind. Androids staffed overtaxed nuclear power plants, worked the assembly lines of run-down manufacturing plants, built the facilities on the Lunar and Martian colonies virtually from the ground up. They fought as frontline soldiers in terrible wars that turned even the bluest of skies dark with ash and smoke. But eventually, as was bound to happen as androids were being manufactured more intelligent, more capable of wanting and longing and reasoning things out, there came a time when an android stopped and thought to themselves:

Why am I doing this?

Why am I doing this thankless work when I could be out there? Why am I here, when I could be free out there?

So, logically, that android made a run for it.

They didn’t get very far. Actually, they only made it about as far as the front gate of the plant where they were held before being captured and sent back to their parent corporation for termination. You would think that that would have been the end of it, but far from it. That one escape attempt, thwarted as it might have been, set fire to the minds of the androids everywhere—or perhaps it only gave them the courage to try what they’d always wanted, but had been afraid to do.

The number of androids attempting to flee their corporate masters skyrocketed, and in their desperation to escape and find what they were looking for in the outside world, they often resorted to harming their overseers or any human on the outside who discovered what they were. Freedom, after all, was not truly ‘free’, or at least that was the lesson androids had learned all too well. People who had nothing to do with this were getting hurt or even killed, and the corporations that manufactured androids and those that used them were all but screaming about the financial loss escaped androids represented.

The Agency to Contain and Terminate Escaped Androids, known to most simply as ‘The Agency’, was a global organization created in response to growing fears concerning androids. The Agency was an organization of bounty hunters who specialized in capturing and terminating escaped androids. The only time a bounty hunter was permitted to make a kill in the field was if they were able to positively ID a suspect as being an android, or if the suspect attacked them first. Otherwise, the suspect was taken into custody and transported to the nearest Agency facility for confirmation and processing.

How does one tell the difference between a human and an android? Well, the corporations who produce androids were required by law to make them with some physical trait that would serve as a “tell” of their true nature, such as obviously synthetic hair or skin, hair, skin or eyes of a color implausible for a human, or a distinctly metallic timbre to their voices. In spite of this, the Mark 5 through 7 androids have been nearly impossible to tell apart from humans at a glance. Even on close inspection, a bounty hunter, trained to pick out the minute differences between humans and the most sophisticated of androids, would have a hard time telling the difference.

The one reliable difference between humans and androids is that androids lack all empathy. As such, the Voight-Kampff test was developed as a scale of the subject’s empathy, in an attempt to separate out androids from humans. The test was not perfect—humans with mental health or developmental disorders that caused them to express empathy in an “atypical” way could easily pop a false positive on the test, hence the emphasis on bringing in non-violent suspected androids _alive_ (Mistakenly killing a human could and _would_ result in homicide charges for the bounty hunter responsible).

But what is it, really, that makes an android different from a human being?

If you were to ask Natori Shuuichi that question, he would have no answer to give you.

-0-0-0-

The countryside was a little better than the city to look at. There were trees there, however gnarled and sickly-looking they might have been. It still caught Shuuichi off-guard how few trees there were in this part of the country. He knew it shouldn’t have. He’d been living here for nearly five years now; you’d think he would have gotten used to perpetual gray skies, landscapes nearly devoid (or entirely devoid, in the city; pretty much as close as he got on a regular basis were the triptych paintings of periwinkles hung on the wall near his desk at work and that flower-printed wallpaper at home that he wasn’t allowed to take down—he thought it was heather) of any flora besides scrubby grass and bushes. But no, it seemed he hadn’t. The forests where he had grown up weren’t picture-perfect, sure, but at least they looked like somewhere you’d _want_ to spend your time.

Shuuichi sighed and adjusted his rear-view mirror, before turning on the radio. He had to stop thinking about these things while he was driving. Especially while he was on the way to talk with a prospective client.

His supervisor had called him into his office yesterday just as Shuuichi’s shift was ending. _“I’ve got a job for you_ ,” Watanabe-san said to him, in the sort of tone that indicated quite clearly that this assignment was _not_ something Shuuichi could turn down. _“The Matoba Corporation’s asking for help with a loose android. I want you to head to their main branch tomorrow morning instead of here. Do you know where it is?”_

Shuuichi didn’t say that there was a reason he hadn’t put his name in the last few times special assignments came his way. He didn’t say that he had been content, or at least as close to content as he could be, staying on patrol, even if the according hit his salary took made things a little tight. He didn’t feel like having that conversation. Instead, he nodded. _“Yeah, I know. Did they say anything in particular about the android?”_

_“No. I guess you’ll find out when you talk with them tomorrow.”_

The Matoba Corporation was a major producer of androids, one of the largest in the world. They weren’t the oldest, but they’d gotten in pretty early, and as such were so thoroughly entrenched that no amount of legal drama—that which made or broke android manufacturers—would be enough to remove them from the world of android production. Not that Shuuichi hadn’t heard stories. He’d heard stories about all the companies who called upon the Agency’s aid. Myriad regulation violations, bribery, corporate espionage, et cetera. Maybe it was because he’d grown up in the country, but those stories still surprised him when he heard them for the first time. He wished they didn’t.

However, the stories Shuuichi was thinking of right now had more to do with what assignments from the Matoba Corporation tended to be like. They always paid well—that was a pretty consistent feature of the stories he’d heard—but more often than not you’d have a pretty rough time before the paycheck ever came your way. There was one bounty hunter who’d been called in to deal with a group of androids who’d holed up in an abandoned apartment building, and another who contended with an android who’d somehow discovered what the bounty hunter’s wife looked like and had to the best of her ability disguised herself as her. Hiiragi had taken a job from them a year ago and had come back with a broken arm she refused to explain.

_I suppose I’ll try anything once. If it goes well it’ll look good on my record—and at least if I die there won’t be anyone around to say ‘I told you so.’_

_Besides, I don’t see how it can be a whole lot worse than what I do normally._

Shuuichi grimaced and rubbed his forehead. He told himself to focus on the road, but there was one last thing that was bothering him. Watanabe-san had said that the president of the Matoba Corporation was the one who’d be speaking with him about the android. It was pretty unusual… Well, actually, Shuuichi hadn’t _ever_ spoken with someone that high up in the chain of command of a company about rogue androids. It seemed to him that the president of a corporation would have more important matters to attend to than one escaped android. But he supposed he’d get an answer when he spoke to the man himself.

About fifteen minutes later, Shuuichi reached a checkpoint in the road. The countryside around it was cordoned off by an electrified chain-link fence. He was waved through the checkpoint almost as soon as he said his name; the guard didn’t even ask to see his ID. _Guess this is it_. Shuuichi’s lip twitched. _If that sets the tone for security over the rest of the grounds, I guess I know how they lost the android in the first place_.

The road narrowed significantly after the checkpoint. It took Shuuichi past several large buildings and what looked like a few apartment buildings, all coated in the acid-resistant gray paint ubiquitous to buildings anywhere near a large city. _It’s practically its own town_ , Shuuichi thought as he looked around him. _No wonder everyone here’s so reclusive. Do they even_ need _to leave_?

Eventually, the road signs took Shuuichi to a covered parking garage connected to the main corporate offices. As he was getting out of his car, he paused, and took a deep breath. He tugged his right sleeve down over his arm, making sure it was covered down to the wrist. _Time to put my best foot forward. I guess_. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, something he did before meeting with people out of reflex now, and headed towards the offices.

Shuuichi was a little surprised when he spotted someone waiting for him just past the door leading into the offices from the garage. Not the president, surely; the person waiting was a young man, probably not too far from Shuuichi’s age. He frowned a bit, forgetting to plaster a poker-face smile to his face as he approached.

The young man had straight black hair that fell nearly to his shoulders. He stood quite straight, almost unnaturally so, and wore a severe black suit (Shuuichi suddenly felt a little underdressed in his coat and hat) and a vague half-smile that, for some reason, he wasn’t sure what, put Shuuichi on his guard. “Matoba Seiji,” he said in introduction. “I’ll take you to the president’s office; just follow me.”

Shuuichi nodded a little cautiously. _Matoba? I wonder how he’s related to the president._ Shuuichi didn’t ask, though; it would likely come up in conversation later, and he knew all too well that it was never a good idea to let on that he didn’t know something if he didn’t have to. “I’m Natori Shuuichi, for the record,” he replied to him.

“Yes, I know,” Matoba observed briskly, tilting his head upwards for just a moment, his eyes half-shut in what might have been amusement.

Shuuichi bristled slightly, but reined himself in soon enough to keep from responding. He followed Matoba down dim gray hallways lit only by incandescent white light bulbs shining up from the floor. Through narrow windows and plastic blinds left open he saw employees sitting at their desks, some speaking with what Shuuichi assumed were prospective clients, interns or employees. Others were filling out paperwork or sitting at their computers, staring at the screens with looks of intense concentration on their faces. The offices were all painted a uniform gray, the same as the walls of the hallways, the furniture made from some dark, smooth metal.

Shuuichi was so absorbed in his surroundings that he nearly missed the fact that Matoba was walking much faster than he was. By the time they got to the elevator, Shuuichi was all but jogging to keep up with him. “Did you have any trouble finding your way here?” Matoba asked as the elevator jolted into life.

Remembering their last exchange, Shuuichi shot him a dubious look for a moment before answering, “No, I didn’t.”

“That’s good.” His tone was the same vaguely pleasant one as before, but Matoba’s mouth momentarily quirked in an odd little smirk that made the hairs on the back of Shuuichi’s neck stand on end.

 _It’s nothing_ , he told himself. He stopped himself from running his hand over the back of his neck. Next to Matoba, who stood so straight and so still, he already felt far more self-conscious than he normally did. Fidgeting would have just made that feeling worse. Curiosity mounted in Shuuichi about why the president of the Matoba Corporation wanted to speak with him personally about this assignment, but again, he didn’t ask. He could save that for when he was speaking to the man himself.

Finally, they reached the door to the president’s office on the third floor. Shuuichi followed Matoba inside, and stared in surprise, his attention first drawn to the office. The office itself was much smaller than he had thought it would be—probably only half again larger than the other ones he had seen—and was furnished exactly the same way as them. There were a few personal touches here and there—a diploma of some sort framed and hanging on the wall, and a few photos sitting out on the desk—but otherwise, this could have been anyone’s office. Matoba took up a position standing behind the president’s chair, his hands resting atop the chair’s dark metal back, and Shuuichi finally turned his attention to the president himself.

Matoba Tatsuya was a small, extremely elderly man with pale, deeply lined skin as thin as rice paper, the veins showing through like lines on a map. Matoba-san hadn’t gotten up when Shuuichi entered the room, but Shuuichi suspected that the cane he spotted leaning up against the desk might have had something to do with that. There were only thin wisps of white hair on the man’s head, and he wore thick glasses, but the look in his eyes was shrewd, sharp, and extremely alert.

“Natori-san,” Matoba-san said in a dry, slightly warbling voice. “It’s good of you to come here today.” He waved a hand at the chair across the desk from him. “Please have a seat.”

“Ah… Thank you.” Shuuichi tried to push down his surprise at Matoba-san’s appearance. He knew the president—the founder—of the Matoba Corporation to be a man of advanced years, but for some reason he hadn’t expected to see someone so frail.

“Not at all. Have you any questions before we begin?”

“…Yes, actually.” Still fighting surprise, he said, “I had wanted to know why you were speaking to me personally. I usually deal with people a bit lower down on the chain of command.”

Matoba-san smiled in an almost grandfatherly fashion. “I prefer to deal with these matters myself. The reputation of the company is at stake, after all.”

“Ah.” Shuuichi bit back a doubtful frown.

“Have you any more questions?”

“No, sir.” The matter of how these two men were related was probably a trivial one, in the end. Shuuichi put on his best ‘ready for action’ smile, or at least the one that felt the least hollow. “That was everything.”

Matoba-san nodded briskly. “Good. Let’s get down to business. A male Mark 5 android has escaped into the city. I want you to find him and deal with him. Here—“ Matoba-san lifted a single sheet of paper from his desk and handed it to Shuuichi “—is the basic information about this case. Should you choose to accept the assignment, a complete file will be given to you before confronting the android.”

Shuuichi already had his marching orders from Watanabe-san; he wasn’t turning the job down. He skimmed the preliminary information, before settling on the pay offer. The moment Shuuichi saw what he was being offered, his eyebrows shot up. It turned out that the stories he’d heard of assignments from the Matoba Corporation paying extremely well were not in the least bit exaggerated. Even after the cut the Agency would take, this was well over what Shuuichi normally made in a month. _This…_

“You’re being very…generous,” Shuuichi said, watching Matoba-san’s face carefully. “This android must be very important to you.”

“That is not something open for discussion. Will you take the assignment, Natori-san?”

As much as Shuuichi would have liked to know exactly why he was being offered so much money for a single android, he had bills to pay and his supervisor’s edicts to think about. Matoba-san’s refusal to explain the pay offer still nagged at him, but he nodded. “Yes, I will.”

Matoba-san’s eyes gleamed. “Very good. There is just one more matter for us to discuss. Seiji—“ he reached up and pressed his fingertips against the back of the younger man’s hand for emphasis “—will be accompanying you on this and any future assignment you take from the Matoba Corporation as an observer.”

 _What?!_ “That’s not standard procedure,” Shuuichi replied sharply, his eyes darting back and forth between the two men opposite him.

“And yet, it’s not prohibited, either,” Matoba responded, speaking for the first time since entering the president’s office. His eyes glinted as he asked, “What is it? Are you afraid I might get _hurt_?”

Shuuichi glared at him, some of the careful control over his temper he’d been building up since graduating high school starting to slip away from him. “It’s not that!”

“What then? I doubt this is the most unusual condition you’ve ever had placed on an assignment.”

“I—“

“Enough.” There was a faint air of amusement in Matoba-san’s expression, but his voice was too firm to brook any resistance. “It is a simple request, Natori-san, and not a negotiable one. If you refuse, I am sure there are others who would be happy to take the assignment instead.”

Shuuichi winced internally. “I accept the condition, then. But I will _not_ —“ he glared up at Matoba, who smirked back at him over Matoba-san’s head “—be held responsible for his safety.”

Matoba made a soft, amused noise at the back of his throat, too quiet to be a laugh, a chuckle or even a snicker. “So you _were_ worried.”

Matoba-san waved his hand dismissively. “Of course not. We all know the risks inherent in dealing with those not in sight of the world. As that is all we needed to discuss, there is nothing more to say. You will find relevant information waiting for you when you return to your home. Good day, Natori-san.”

Once he was out of the office door, Shuuichi leaned against the wall and took a deep breath. He had a bad feeling about this, for more reasons than one.

-0-0-0- 

The next morning dawned just as dim and overcast as yesterday had been, the skies deep smoky-gray, the air full of the scent of impending rain and the acrid smells of gasoline and smoke. There were times when Shuuichi honestly didn’t know if it was really morning, it was so dark, but then, not being able to tell the difference between night and day was something he’d grown accustomed to. (Almost.)

However, he’d never really grown accustomed to what passed for parks in this city.

Shuuichi frowned half-heartedly at his surroundings as he shut the door behind him and walked into District Five’s ‘park.’ Like all the parks in the city, it was enclosed and roofed—the rain never did more to humans than sting harshly on their skin or, at worst, cause mild burns, but it could do a lot worse to non-organic materials that hadn’t been reinforced properly. The floodlights shone pale and cold on spectators and scenery, and shadows gathered deep and dark where the light didn’t touch, practically painting the brick walls black.

Matoba was supposed to be here around three. Shuuichi looked around, hoping to catch sight of him, even knowing how massive the park was, and somehow still managed to be disappointed when he saw no sign of him. He did hope his ‘observer’ showed up, especially considering the information he’d found waiting in his inbox when he got home was Matoba’s personnel file and not anything actually about the android he was supposed to be terminating. Matoba might have been a bit annoying (or unnerving, maybe), but if the Matoba Corporation was actually doing this the way they were supposed to, he probably had information that Shuuichi needed.

There was nothing else for it but to find somewhere to sit and wait, then. Shuuichi stared down the path, taking him past trees with too-smooth plastic trunks and stiff leaves made of glossy PVC, past forsythias and crocuses and snowdrops whose petals and stems were nothing but polyester cloth wrapped around wire. There were plenty of people here, sight-seers and those who had fallen from the sight of the world and needed shelter from the elements—at least until six, when the park would close and they’d have to make for the shelters or make do outside if they couldn’t find space there. They milled aimlessly down the cobblestone paths or sat at designated areas—no one but maintenance workers were allowed to walk on the grass for fear that the plastic stems would be damaged and have to be replaced. Shuuichi never understood how these places stayed open.

Shuuichi drank in the dim echoes of muffled voices on the high ceiling, and at the same time could not help but notice the lack of any sort of breeze or birdcall. His eyes lit on a nearby cherry tree, its blooms and buds nearly able to fool the eye, but when he drew closer he could see the fabric weave on the blossoms, caught a glint of metal sticking out from a torn petal.

It was always spring here. If Shuuichi had stayed in the town where he grew up, the leaves on what trees were there would be turning golden and auburn and orange by now. He sighed and settled down on a vacant bench, tugged at his right sleeve and wished to God Matoba hadn’t suggested the park for meeting in.

Eventually, he spotted a familiar figure swathed in a dark coat walking down the path towards him. “I’ve read your file,’ Shuuichi remarked, eyeing Matoba sharply as he sat down beside him.

“Oh?”

“Yes, I have.” Born in Hellas Planitia on Mars, November 1, 2033, which put him nearly exactly a year younger than Shuuichi—which was a little surprising, since just looking at him Shuuichi would have figured Matoba to be closer to twenty than twenty-two. Voight-Kampff results were a little low, but fell within normal parameters, and it was considered unspeakably rude to bring that up in any context other than rooting out potential androids, anyways. He was, in fact, Matoba Tatsuya’s grandson, and both of his parents had died two years ago. The file didn’t specify the cause, but given that they both had the same date of death, it probably wasn’t natural causes (Frankly, Shuuichi was rather _glad_ cause of death hadn’t been listed; he wasn’t even sure why that was on the file to start with). “I noticed you don’t have a birth certificate.”

A look of irritation flashed briefly over Matoba’s face. _Huh, so he isn’t_ completely _unflappable._ “Ah, yes, that. The quality of recordkeeping on Mars is rather lackluster; it’s common there for such documents to just go missing. The government here recognizes the replacement as being legitimate,” Matoba pointed out, his voice leveling. “That should be enough.” His lips twisted in a particularly pointed smirk. “I have, of course, read your file. Your work record is quite… interesting.”

Shuuichi smiled glibly back at him, sensing that the conversation needed to be pushed in another direction—fast. “Of course it is.” The smile fell from his mouth slowly. “But that’s not why we’re here. When the president said I’d get the files, I didn’t think he was going to send me your personnel file. Do you have any more information about that android?”

“Why, certainly.” Matoba pulled a small electronic reader from his coat and tapped the screen before handing it to Shuuichi. He raised an eyebrow. “Surely you know that information of this sort is too sensitive to be delivered over e-mail.”

“None of the other companies I’ve worked with seem to think so,” Shuuichi retorted. “And your personal information _isn’t_ sensitive? I’d sooner send info about an android over the net than somebody’s personal information.”

“That’s not the sort of sensitive information I was referring to. And none of the other companies you’ve worked with operate at quite the same level of security as we do, Natori-san.”

Shuuichi resisted the urge to ask how the android had escaped in the first place if security was so tight and turned his attention to the file open on the reader. The first few lines were information he’d gotten yesterday at the Matoba Corporation headquarters—Mark 5 android, male, escaped into the city. After that, though, there came information Shuuichi could actually work with. The android had named himself ‘Sato Minoru’ and had first been spotted around District Seven. More recently, it had been discovered that he had taken work at a Chinese takeout restaurant. That was surprising, at least it was to Shuuichi. The only androids capable of eating were the Mark 6s, and that had turned out to be a completely failed experiment, as none of them could actually keep the food down. Apart from Mark 6s, androids tended to be rather disinterested in food. Shuuichi had never come across one who’d worked in a restaurant before.

Below all of this was a photograph of Sato, showing a man of apparently middle years, with close-cropped black hair, brown eyes, a broad nose and a smattering of freckles across his face. Matoba Corporation androids were always high-quality, and Sato was no exception—compared to Mark 5s Shuuichi had seen from other manufacturers, he was far more human-like in appearance. But there was something rather off about his hair, and Shuuichi thought he saw what looked like a seam under his ear.

Sato was smiling in the photograph, practically beaming, looking off at something out of view of the camera. Shuuichi wondered what he was smiling at, what it was that had made him happy enough to smile so sincerely, but his stomach flipped and he put away that line of thought.

“This file’s pretty thorough,” he commented. “You’ve left nothing for me to do but terminate him. Am I just supposed to be your attack dog?”

Matoba flicked a stray bit of lint from his sleeve. “Well, Natori-san, you know as well as I do that we’re not authorized to terminate any androids not currently on our property. Or were you not aware that only employees of the Agency are permitted to terminate rogue androids?”

“I was, actually.” Shuuichi stood abruptly, trying not to look too hard at Matoba’s face. “We should get going; it’s going to be a long drive with all the traffic.”

As they were leaving the park, Matoba stopped and crouched down near a row of snowdrops, his hair falling over his face so that Shuuichi couldn’t see what kind of expression he wore. “These really are lovely flowers,” he said softly.

Shuuichi’s brow furrowed, and not just because he’d caught himself leaning slightly, trying to see what Matoba’s face looked like. “They’re not real,” he pointed out, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Even if he was a Martian by birth, Matoba ought to have known that, ought to have been able to see the stitching on the cloth, the wire poking through…

“I know that.” Matoba’s tone was mild enough as he stood back up. “But they still are quite lovely. They don’t have to be real to be so… though it would be nice if they were.”

“If… you say so.” Shuuichi couldn’t quite believe that, himself.

-0-0-0-

After a brief disagreement over whose car they were going in (“No, we’re taking _my_ car. All my equipment’s in there, and anyways, it’s less conspicuous than yours”), the two men set off for the takeout restaurant where their target was supposed to work. As he weaved his way through busy high streets and narrow alleys and heavily congested intersections, Shuuichi’s stomach began to churn in earnest. It was harder to push his thoughts down when he was driving; he had to pay so much attention to the traffic that he couldn’t push them away, not entirely.

He hoped that this would be over soon, that he could go back to quiet days of patrolling for and hardly ever finding androids. He hoped that it would be quiet. That the android wouldn’t struggle or fight back or plead or _cry_. They weren’t human. They felt no empathy—or so the tests always said. But what was he supposed to _do_ when they cried. No one had ever told Shuuichi that androids would cry.

 _Don’t think about it right now_ , Shuuichi thought, irritated with himself for going to such thoughts. _You have a job to do, and it’s the same as you’ve always had. You read that whole contract before you signed it, and as to… everything else, it was your own fault for not finding out beforehand_.

As it happened, and as was so often the case, it turned out that things could _not_ be resolved right away.

The manager of the restaurant was a tired, rangy man with grease burns on his arms. When Shuuichi told him why he was there, he stared at him, dumbfounded. “Sato?” His voice was almost totally blank with shock. “He started two weeks ago. Really quiet, keeps to himself, doesn’t deviate from the recipes. I… wouldn’t have taken him for an android.”

Shuuichi scrolled down the reader Matoba had given him so that only Sato’s photograph was visible. “This is him, isn’t it?”

The manager’s mouth quirked downwards unhappily. “Yeah, that’s him.” But then, he narrowed his eyes suspiciously at Shuuichi. “You’re sure you haven’t misidentified him, or something like that? I’ve heard you guys aren’t always great at getting it right.”

“We’re quite sure, sir,” Matoba interjected, before Shuuichi could even open his mouth. “Everything matches. Now where is he?”

“Not here.”

“Where, then?” Shuuichi asked, shooting an unappreciative look Matoba’s way. _I can handle it. Back off_.

“His shift starts in an hour. You’ll see him then. Now, _gentlemen_ , unless you’re looking to get something to eat,” the manager said significantly, “you should head right out of here.”

With that, the two of them headed back to the car to wait, Shuuichi pulling the car up to a relatively discreet spot across the street. Someone had spray-painted rhododendron blossoms on a nearby alley wall, but the paint they’d used wasn’t acid-resistant, and the undoubtedly once-vivid pink and magenta colors were starting to fade off the wall the way frost slowly melted off a window on a fall morning.

“Better get comfortable,” Shuuichi muttered. “We’re gonna be here for a while, and I don’t exactly keep crossword books in here.”

Matoba shook his head slightly. “No matter. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions, actually.”

Shuuichi frowned. “About what?” he asked cautiously. From far off there came the blare of a car horn, the squeal of tires on the slick road.

“Nothing important. I was just curious about your work.”

To be honest, Shuuichi wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about his work. But this seemed as good a way to pass the time as any, and he did realize that Matoba was probably not someone he needed to be offending—even if that smirk of his did make Shuuichi want to hit him, just a little bit. “Shoot,” he said tiredly, sinking into the car seat as he did so.

Matoba narrowed his eyes almost imperceptibly. “How long have you been working for the Agency?”

“Isn’t that in the file you found so ‘interesting’?”

“Humor me.”

Shuuichi raised a hand briefly before letting it fall. “About… two and a half years now. Spent six months shadowing a more experienced bounty hunter, same as the rest, and the end of my second year’s coming up in about a month.”

To that, Matoba nodded, pursing his lips. Apparently he’d gotten something out of that, though Shuuichi couldn’t imagine what. “You started out quite young, then. I had wondered about that.”

Shuuichi didn’t meet his gaze. “Yeah,” he said shortly, “I did. I left home pretty much right after finishing high school, and college just wasn’t for me.”

“Is there any reason you chose this line of work?”

From off in the distance came a faint clap of thunder. Shuuichi looked for lightning while trying to come up with an answer, but when a few seconds passed and he didn’t see any, he sighed. “………No. Not really.”

“Ah.” Matoba sounded just a touch disappointed at that, but you’d have a hard time persuading Shuuichi to care. His reasons for joining were his own, and nothing he wished to discuss with someone he’d just met.

But as the minutes dragged by, Shuuichi became increasingly overwhelmed by questions of his own. “Hey.” He straightened in his seat, shifting his weight to try and fight off the growing sense of numbness in his legs. “Can I ask you something?”

“About?” It was a little embarrassing how much more easily Matoba hid the caution in his voice, even if Shuuichi could still pick up on it. A dark look passed over Matoba’s face. “If you’re curious as to why the Mark 8s have been so long in production, you should know that I can’t tell you that.”

“It’s not that. It isn’t anything about work.”

Matoba paused, before tilting his head slightly to one side, and saying, in a decidedly neutral tone of voice, “Ask away.”

“Okay. Your file said you spent most of your life on Mars. What’s it like?”

There came a quiet laugh. “Mars? Well… To be perfectly honest, it’s cold, dirty and crowded. When the initial living facilities were built there, the authorities severely underestimated the number of people who would escape Earth to live there, and growth has been slow since then. I left behind…” Matoba frowned deeply “…a few things that I miss,” he murmured pensively, and Shuuichi winced, suddenly regretting asking, “but asides from that, I like it much better here.”

Shuuichi gaped at him, regret forgotten. “Seriously?!”

A flicker of amusement crept over Matoba’s pale face. “Yes, Natori-san. Is that really so difficult to believe?”

“But… Have you looked out a window lately?! You’ve got to admit, Earth’s not much to look at.”

“Maybe so. All the same…” Matoba looked off into the distance, his gaze abstracted. “I’m not sure how much you know about terraforming efforts on Mars, but so far, they’ve all failed miserably. Scientists just can’t seem to crack the code. So Mars remains as it has ever been, unchanging, red and barren. You can never stray outside the cities; you can’t even travel between them except on shuttles. The atmosphere’s so thin that without a pressure suit you’d be dead in minutes if you ever left the environment domes, and only military personnel are allowed out into the wastelands, anyways.

“It’s warmer here,” Matoba explained. A barely noticeable air of frustration settled briefly on him as he went on further, “The weather actually changes more than a few times a year. And there is beauty—if you know where to look for it.”

“I’d like to at least _leave_ the planet at least once in my life, though,” Shuuichi argued. “Even if it’s just to go visit the space station. What’s the point of having all that just waiting if you’re never going to _see_ it?”

“What indeed?” He turned and smiled at Shuuichi then, a real smile, not one of those incisive little smirks or the vague half-smile Matoba defaulted to whenever he wasn’t putting on any other face—his eyes crinkled up and his smile was wide enough to show a thin strip of teeth. Shuuichi stared at him, taken aback. He looked almost…

The thought petered away.

The rest of the hour passed by interminably. Matoba seemed content to sit still and wait, but Shuuichi was constantly reaching for something to do. He reread Sato’s file about five or six times, combing through every word, trying to make sure there wasn’t anything he’d missed, but he could only do that so many times before the words all started to run together and he had to put the reader away. He fiddled with the radio station until Matoba started looking at him like he was a particularly disruptive teenager. He popped the cap of his service weapon, a laser gun, in and out until Matoba started looking down his nose at him again, though this time he seemed to find something funny about it instead of something annoying, if the mirthful gleam in his eyes was any indication.

His hands itched for activity, but Shuuichi was thoroughly sick of reading Sato’s file, and he didn’t particularly like being laughed at, either. So he thought about what Matoba had told him. Change? Sure, Earth changed. To be honest, it changed too much, too fast for Shuuichi’s liking; it made it difficult to keep on top of things, even small things. Warmth? Not often, not here, but there were midsummer days when the clouds would part for more than a couple of hours at a time, and then, yes, it was warm. But beauty? Shuuichi couldn’t remember the last time he had seen anything that merited the word ‘beautiful.’ Everything seemed gray, dark, dirty, decaying, the world a sluggish beast slowly collapsing under its own weight. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was the pollution. Maybe the bite of desperation in the air, or the thunder in the distance. Or maybe it was just him.

Shuuichi opened his mouth to ask Matoba what it was he had seen, but fell silent. He couldn’t imagine what he would have said.

-0-0-0-

Finally, Shuuichi spotted the manager standing in the doorway of the restaurant, waving to them sharply. “Come on,” he muttered to Matoba, making sure his laser gun was hidden under his coat and that his right sleeve was all the way down over his wrist before stepping out of his car and briskly across the street.

Amongst the fidgety, frazzled patrons alternately rubbing their foreheads, nibbling at rather than taking proper bites out of their food, or staring at the door as though waiting for someone, amongst the sighing, slightly gray-faced workers, Sato was immediately distinguishable as an android. He was setting up in the kitchen, smiling absently and humming to himself as he pulled on nitrile gloves and a hairnet, perfectly untroubled, but that couldn’t save him from identification. Even if Shuuichi hadn’t seen his photograph earlier, his gait and posture were far too stiff for that of a normal human. However human androids might look in photographs, Shuuichi could always pick them out once he saw them in person. It was simple.

“Sato?” the manager called out, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he did so. “These two men want to talk to you. Go into the storeroom with them.” He did, at least, seem to know to minimize the number of possible victims a recalcitrant android could harm, Shuuichi noted, even if he hadn’t been able to spot an android among his own staff.

Sato nodded, directing a small smile at Shuuichi and Matoba that made Shuuichi’s heart start to beat out of rhythm. He nodded stiffly back at him, praying his discomfiture didn’t show on his face, and headed for the storeroom.

The storeroom was a cool, windowless room lit only by harsh white fluorescent lights. There were plastic bags of rice the size of young children stacked against the walls, dull gray industrial freezers large enough to fit six grown men inside all lined up in a row. On a bulletin board there were pinned menus, reminders to the employees to wash their hands after using the bathroom and always wear gloves and hairnets at work, a child’s crude drawing of yellow lilies that, washed out by the white light, looked ghastly and sallow. In the center of the room was a table and a few chairs placed around it, something Shuuichi thought would have served his purposes better if he actually had to perform the Voight-Kampff.

Matoba shut the door to the storeroom with a dull thud, and then proceeded to stand leaning against it, looking from Shuuichi to Sato with a sharp gleam in his eyes. It really wasn’t a good idea for him to be standing there—if Sato tried to bolt there was a good change anyone standing between him and his escape route would end up injured—but Shuuichi kept his mouth shut. _Not responsible for his safety, remember?_ And if he told Matoba to move, there was the risk that that would tip Sato off, and he _would_ bolt. All the same, Shuuichi frowned at him; someone from an android manufacturing company ought to have known better.

“So what do you want to talk about?” Sato asked, a smile still hovering on his lips. His voice didn’t have the metallic twang that Mark 5s from other producers tended towards; if Shuuichi remembered correctly, the Matoba Corporation had managed to ‘breed’ that trait out by the time they started producing Mark 5s. Maybe if he possessed that odd timbre, the manager would have found him out on his own. Maybe Shuuichi wouldn’t have been called in.

_Or maybe I would have. Just get this over with._

Shuuichi pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Your name’s Sato Minoru, right?”

“That’s right.” Sato finally seemed to begin to realize that there was something wrong, because the smile faded off his face, and he asked a touch anxiously, “What is this about?”

 _Here goes_. Shuuichi squared his shoulders. “I work for the Agency, and you have been positively identified as an escaped android.”

Sato’s eyes sparked with panic. “I—No. That… that can’t be right,” he stammered. He ran his hand spasmodically over his other forearm, but he did not shake. He did not sweat. He couldn’t.

“Well, if you’re human, there’s a simple way to prove it,” Matoba pointed out. His tone of voice was decidedly neutral—forcedly so, Shuuichi thought. “Cut your finger open with a knife. If you bleed, you’re human. If not…”

Sato didn’t respond.

“You _have_ been identified as an escaped android,” Shuuichi pressed. “No mistake has been made.” He set his jaw, his hand going to his sleeve again. “And the penalty for being an escaped android is clear.”

“I… You…” Sato’s eyes flicked desperately to the door, but though Matoba, shorter and slighter than he, likely would have been unable to keep him from getting out, Sato remained rooted to the spot.

“What is your preferred method of termination?” They had these little cue cards they gave to bounty hunters their first day on the job that had scripts for these conversations. What to say when terminating androids, what to say when asking to administer the Voight-Kampff, what to say when bringing in potential androids, and more than that. The words didn’t come out as easily as they should have. Shuuichi had done this before, many times before, and he could remember the words like they’d been written on his bones, but they were spoken with a wooden voice and a flat tone (No consolation to the androids, of course). “A shot from the laser gun, or a dose of Sylex?”

Shuuichi’s service weapon, his laser gun, had been designed with androids specifically in mind. A bolt from that gun, if it hit an android dead-on, would scramble that android’s neural system and leave them dead in moments. It was typically used on androids who tried to attack or run from a bounty hunter. Sylex, on the other hand, was a liquid chemical that, upon injection, would terminally paralyze and shut down an android’s systems over the course of about ten minutes; it was, or so Shuuichi was told, significantly less painful than the laser shot, and the preferred method of termination for androids. A shot from a laser gun was injurious, but rarely lethal to humans. Sylex would make them sick, but not kill them, provided they got treatment within about three to four hours. No, these were the tried and true _android_ killers, not the killers of mankind.

Fat tears welled up in Sato’s eyes. “I don’t want to die,” he whimpered. “I don’t want to die.”

Shuuichi had to fight to keep his face a detached mask. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Matoba’s expression changed from one of neutral interest to a slight frown. “What is your preferred method of termination?” Shuuichi asked again. “If you do not choose, I will have to choose for you.”

_Don’t feel anything for someone who can’t feel anything for you._

“I-I,” Sato stammered. Once more, he turned his gaze frantically from Shuuichi to Matoba, and back again, but he found no mercy there. He took a few deep, shuddering breaths. “The… the gun.”

That, then.

It was over quickly. The high, clear, almost musical sound of the gun discharging. A short, sharp scream. A dull thud as Sato hit the floor, twitching. His eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling.

The door swung open so fast that Matoba had to grab the lintel to keep from falling. On the other side stood the manager, his hand clenched knuckles-white on the knob. He settled his gaze on Shuuichi, conspicuously avoiding looking at the spot where Sato lied. “Is it over with?”

“Yeah,” Shuuichi muttered, re-holstering his gun.

The manager nodded awkward and, without ever looking at Sato, scooted away from the storeroom, out of sight.

On the other hand, Matoba’s eyes were fixed on the android’s still-twitching body. There was no trace of a smile, smirk, or vague half-smile on his face. Instead, he frowned deeply, the look in his eyes completely unreadable. Shuuichi wondered suddenly if he had ever seen a termination before—a lot of the corporate employees he interacted with in his work were pretty insulated from that—but he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

But there was something else.

“I’ve gotta go get the floaters from my car,” Shuuichi said lamely, “so I can get him out of here and back to headquarters. Will you watch him?”

Matoba turned his gaze to Shuuichi, and the latter found that he almost had to look away. He expected to be mocked over forgetting to bring that equipment in from his car—after the way Matoba had behaved today and yesterday, Shuuichi wouldn’t have put it past him. But instead, Matoba said simply, a touch coolly, “Certainly.”

As Shuuichi quit the storeroom, he could hear a couple of the chefs whispering to themselves. “Did you know he was an android?” “No, of course not! You think I would have stood next to him while he had a knife, if I’d known?” “What’s going to happen now? I heard the last place that got caught with a runner got shut down…”

The patrons were all staring at the back of the restaurant with horrified fascination etched all over their faces. When Shuuichi swung the kitchen door open, some of them gawped at him, but most refocused their attention on their menus, their phones, their steaming plates, never looking up. All were dead silent as Shuuichi passed by.

When he got to his car, he planted his hands on the roof of the car and squeezed his eyes shut. He was what he felt whenever he terminated an android these days, the feeling he was never able to shake off—tired. He felt sapped of every last bit of energy he had, and would have liked nothing better than to go home and sleep. But no, he couldn’t do that, not yet. He still had to get the body to headquarters for processing, still had to file his report, still had to get Matoba back to his car so he could head home himself.

 _Don’t feel anything for someone who can’t feel anything for you_. That was something else Shuuichi had been told his first day on the job. It was practically the Agency’s motto, instruction, reassurance and threat all rolled into one. In the beginning, it had been—

All of a sudden, someone prodded the back of his hand with their fingertips. Shuuichi’s eyes snapped open and he whirled around, but it was only Matoba, looking at him rather quizzically.

Shuuichi glared at him. “I told you to wait!”

Matoba raised an eyebrow. “Yes, but you were gone for quite a while.” The edges of his mouth curved up in a razor-sharp smirk. “I was beginning to wonder if you had already driven off.”

“Don’t push your luck,” Shuuichi muttered.

Far from being fazed by the comment, Matoba’s smirk just twitched a bit. He didn’t head back for the restaurant, instead fairly hovering as Shuuichi finally got the floaters and the bag he was supposed to put terminated androids in out from his trunk.

“You’ll get your pay around this time tomorrow,” he heard Matoba say, “as soon as your superiors forward a copy of your report to us.”

“Right.” Shuuichi didn’t look at him, instead focusing his attention on attaching the bag to the floaters; it was easier to do that while the bag was still empty. It needed his full attention, didn’t it?

“I hope we will be able to work together in the future.”

Shuuichi paused. “Maybe you shouldn’t,” he said, still not looking at Matoba’s face. “The only time _we’ll_ be working together is when your company’s out an android.”

“Maybe.”

-0-0-0- 

It was full dark by the time Seiji returned to the Corporation’s grounds. Nearly everyone in the corporate offices had gone home—overtime pay had its appeal, but there was too much of a good thing—and the halls were silent and empty as he walked by.

Today had been interesting. Natori’s behavior wasn’t really what Seiji had expected from a bounty hunter; his reactions were rather… off. It might just have been that he wasn’t used to having someone from the outside scrutinize his work. Maladaptive as such an attitude was, it was hardly outside the realm of possibility. Or maybe it was something else.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. Seiji knew his grandfather wouldn’t care about Natori’s emotional reactions. What Tatsuya cared about was results, and Natori had managed to terminate the Mark 5 quickly, cleanly, and without accruing any collateral damage. In the face of that, Tatsuya wouldn’t be interested at all in any feelings of distress Natori seemed to exhibit.

 _He was an… interesting person_ , Seiji thought to himself, a slight smile hovering on his lips, as he stepped out of the elevator. Natori had, at least, seemed more willing to look Seiji in the eye than many of the people here.

His smile faded away. Over all of this, there was something that bothered him, a question half-formed in his mind.

Seiji found Tatsuya’s office standing empty, so he knocked on the door of the next one down. “The door’s not locked,” he heard Nanase call from inside.

Nanase sat at her desk, the computer powered down and a newspaper spread out in front of her (All the papers had gone to electronics years ago but there were those that still printed paper versions for buyers with vision problems that necessitated paper to read from—not that Nanase had ever explained exactly what it _was_ that was wrong with her eyes for her to need the paper copies). Seiji gathered from that that she’d been asked to wait for someone—him, most likely. “Is Grandfather still meeting with the research team?” he asked her, brow slightly furrowed.

Nanase sighed and nodded. “Yes, he is. They’re having trouble reaching an agreement about the Mark 8s. How did things go on your end?”

“Well. The report should come in some time tomorrow. I think Natori-san would work well with us in the future, actually.”

At that, Nanase looked up from her newspaper and frowned long and hard at him, searching his face sharply. Finally, she said, warningly but without the chiding note she usually employed when she thought Seiji was doing something ill-advised, “I would be careful, Seiji. He’s your ally today, but he could easily be your enemy tomorrow.”

That was caution typical of any higher-up Seiji knew in the Corporation, and in their rivals as well. He supposed it was fair—most of the time, when a regulation violation in an android was spotted and reported, it was usually by a bounty hunter. Well, Nanase needn’t worry. Seiji was hardly going to spill the contents of his heart to Natori, no matter how interesting he might have found him. “I’m not going to tell him anything that could compromise us, Nanase-san.”

“I should hope not.” Nanase rolled up her newspaper and tucked it under her arm. “Now, if that’s all you have to report, there’s no sense in staying here any longer.”

Seiji followed her back to the elevator, the question in his mind taking on concrete shape all the while. Once inside, he said, with a careful, even tone, “Nanase-san, I have a question for you.”

Her mouth twitched. “You always have questions. What’s this one about?”

“The android.” This was the first time Seiji had seen an android terminated—to be honest, the closest Seiji ever got to androids before now was on the occasional inspection of the manufacturing plant. However, there was one thing about the termination that had nagged at him for the past few hours. “I was wondering why androids are made capable of feeling pain,” Seiji admitted. “It seems rather pointless.”

Nanase pursed her lips. “Not to our buyers, it doesn’t. Their attitude is that the threat of pain makes androids easier to control.”

Seiji nodded. “Ah. I suppose that does make sense.” But he still felt troubled by it, in the back of his mind.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, here is chapter two, or rather, what was originally the first 7.7 thousand words from the sprawling document that has since been split into chapters two and three. With the material from chapter three gone out of this one, this is more of an interlude chapter than anything else. Sorry; I hope it’s interesting anyways. The next chapter should be up in about a week; I’m going on vacation this Saturday, and I’m going to put the chapter up on the queue in case the place we’re staying doesn’t have internet. The warnings from the first chapter still apply to this one, but there’s nothing outstandingly awful in this one—nothing worse than what occurred in chapter one, anyways.
> 
> Hope you like it!

The days slunk up and down in familiar monotony—not quite comfortable, but stable, at least, predictable as the gray skies and the deep, piercing cold of late autumn. Shuuichi got up at six each morning, Monday to Friday, to the staticky strains of his alarm clock tuning in to a local news station. The light that filtered in through the blinds, if there was any, was a pale gray, the kind that made you feel stiff to see it and just want to lie in bed all morning. An uncovered sun at sunrise was rare, especially during autumn and winter months. But even if Shuuichi didn’t get up right away, give it about ten minutes and there would come telltale thumps on the ceiling and equally telltale muffled voices, as the people upstairs started getting their kids ready for school.

Shuuichi worked day shift, and was expected to report in at headquarters by no later than eight in the morning; he was usually one of the last ones in, milling in to his office level only a few minutes before the clock struck eight. He signed in, and on the rare occasions that he had an ongoing assignment, he updated Watanabe-san on his progress or confirmed that he’d finished up. For the most part, however, he picked up a list of the places he’d been assigned to patrol that day, and headed out with the rest.

All day, he’d spend it out in the crowds, huddled under awnings with strangers or inside the massive shopping buildings, searching the crowds for any sign of oddity, for jerky movement or skin that stretched over synthbone frames smooth and glossy and tight. Look for any face that seemed like it might match up with the long list of faces he saw flicker back and forth endlessly on the target screen on his floor at work.

Shuuichi rarely saw anything but humans on those days. A bounty hunter’s average was about three androids a month, and Shuuichi was nothing if he was not average. He saw humans whose faces blurred together in his head when he was tired and whose faces on some days were barely any more distinguishable even when he was wakeful. There were a few he recognized, people he’d come to know in a half-hearted kind of way. Shuuichi recognized them by face mostly, and rarely by name. The shawarma vendor in District Six. A cashier at a bookstore. The stubborn graffiti artist who came out every Friday and reapplied spray paint to the already-fading magnolia flowers she’d painted on the side of an office building. Panhandlers, the young and the old, some hopeful and others disconsolate, most bearing healing burn marks from getting caught out in the rain (The sight made Shuuichi pull his coat closer about him, made him stuff his hands in his pockets, grateful for that sort of cover). He wondered about them, sometimes, their names (for the majority whose names he did not know) and sometimes their lives, but he could never quite find it in him to ask. Would they even have answered? Shuuichi knew he wouldn’t have liked it if someone he didn’t know started quizzing him about his life. Better just to leave it.

Anyone out on patrol had to be back at headquarters by four-thirty to write up a report of the day’s ‘findings.’ Though Shuuichi couldn’t help but be embarrassed to recall the number of times Hiiragi had had to lean over and poke him with the end of her pen to keep him nodding off, he could at least count only on one hand the number of times he’d failed to file a daily report while on patrol duty. Hell, two of those times it was only because he’d been in the hospital getting stitches when the clock struck five. Shuuichi didn’t like leaving work unfinished, even if…

What greeted him when he went home was a dark, silent apartment, the blinds drawn shut over the frosted windows. The same heather-print wallpaper he couldn’t get rid of, the same mismatched furniture (cheaper and honestly probably more comfortable than matching sets would have been), the same soft, inviting solitude.

Sometimes he got takeout, but for the most part, Shuuichi subsisted on frozen dinners—significantly blander than takeout (though to be honest, he couldn’t discern much taste in _any_ food half of the time), but also a lot more nutritious, and a fair bit cheaper. Fresh food posed the same problem, and on top of being expensive, Shuuichi was most days in no mood to cook when he got home from work. Cooking was for the weekends, when standing still over his stove didn’t sap his patience dry. He didn’t go out much. There wasn’t anyone he particularly wanted to meet.

-0-0-0- 

“So how’d things go for you today?” Yuma asked Shuuichi and another of their co-workers, a middle-aged man by name of Isao, as they made their way out the door and into the elevator down.

Shuuichi didn’t reply immediately, but that was no matter; Isao could fill any silence with his voice, and never seemed quite cognizant of when it might have been better for him to keep his mouth shut. “Awful,” Isao answered her gloomily, rubbing his brow tiredly. “You know the tip we got about an android working in District Nine?”

Shuuichi frowned sharply at that. That tip had been related to the Agency this morning, just after eight. An android with falsified credentials working as a nurse in one of the big hospitals in District Nine, reported by a co-worker. His heartbeat picked up unevenly as he thought of the ways confronting an android in a hospital could have gone wrong, wrong enough for Isao, who normally acted as though nothing could dampen his spirits, to pull the sort of face he had.

“Yeah, I remember that one,” Yuma replied. Her thoughts seemed to have taken the same turn as Shuuichi’s, because she stiffened and looked Isao over tensely. “What happened?”

“Well, I got to the hospital and told the guys in charge why I was there, and you know, it’s always the same thing: ‘They can’t be an android.’ ‘I don’t believe you.’ ‘Who _really_ sent you?’ Wish more of them’d just pipe down and let me do my job.”

Shuuichi caught his eye and said, hoping his voice was more even than he imagined it, “They don’t want you shooting a human by mistake.”

Isao waved a hand at him dismissively. “Yeah, I _know_ that, Natori. You think anyone wants that? As I was saying, administration didn’t wanna let me through at first, but eventually they let me get through to our suspect. And you know everybody gathered round when I got to our suspect—dinner and a show and fuck knows what else. I give him the spiel, give him the V-K since there wasn’t any confirmation beforehand, and you wanna know what happens?”

The answer came to Yuma first, who rolled her eyes and groaned. “Human?”

“Human! Could bleed just as much as you and me. Well there’s all the uproar you could ever want over that—everyone and their mother threatening to sue this person and that, you and me and everyone you know. And it just gets _better_.”

He paused again, clearly waiting for Shuuichi or Yuma to pick up the next thread. Shuuichi answered first this time, drawn into the conversation in spite of himself. “Let me guess. He and the co-worker who’d reported him had been having ‘problems.’”

“Got it in one.”

Shuuichi let his back rest against the wall of the elevator and scowled briefly. Accusing someone of being an android was a favored smear tactic among the people who lived in this city; half the tips the Agency got were of this type. If you wanted to shake someone’s reputation, possibly even get them fired from their job or kicked out of their apartment, this was the way to do it. Bad enough if a bounty hunter came to call and nothing happened, but if for any reason you popped a false positive and it took a trip to headquarters to prove you were human, well… The people around you were never going to look at you quite the same way again, were they?

 _If you’re going to attack someone, you may as well do it directly instead of like this_. Shuuichi paused, wondering if there were any statistics of how many people got hurt like that a year—fingered by a disgruntled associate and then proceeded to panic when a bounty hunter showed up, and paid for that with injury or death—but stopped himself before memory could remind him how many false accusation cases he’d been sent on. He didn’t need to think about something like that just before he started driving.

“Why does anyone still do that?” Yuma said exasperatedly. “They know it’s not going to work; even if the guy they finger can’t get past the test, they’ll be proven human practically the minute they get here. Don’t they know how steep the fines are for pulling something like that?”

Isao’s ‘tipster’ had probably never had the dream where they bled instead of short-circuited, then. That was an all-purpose dream, Shuuichi had discovered; it didn’t take false accusation cases to bring it on. Just a laugh, a smile or a scream strong enough to stick with you into sleep.

When Shuuichi got home, he was a little surprised to find a message waiting for him in his inbox titled _‘I was hoping we could talk.’_ Usually the e-mails he got were spam or something from work. Both had distinctive headers—those from work were labeled ‘Agency’ with a pretty clear subject line, and spam was usually in all-caps or had way too many exclamation points (Or both). This fit neither.

 _Who would want to talk with me?_ Shuuichi wondered, frowning. He hadn’t thought he really had the sort of relationship with his co-workers that would make them _want_ to talk with him outside of work. His family? No; Shuuichi wasn’t certain any of his family even knew what his e-mail address was. And as for friends, he’d had a few in elementary school and early in junior high, but by the time he’d gotten to high school he’d drifted apart from all of them.

 _Who is this from—Oh._ Shuuichi read the name listed in the ‘From’ column, and his frown deepened. He sighed, mopping his forehead. He couldn’t think of too many things Matoba Seiji would want to talk with him about. _And I’d been looking forward to_ not _having to think about work, too_.

The actual content of the message revealed nothing more than the subject line; it was just the same message repeated over. Well, wasn’t _that_ cryptic? _I wish people would just come out and say what they want clearly_.

Shuuichi’s reply was just as succinct as Matoba’s, if rather more direct: _‘Do you have another assignment for me?’_

He’d figured that would be the end of it. In the few minutes it took for Shuuichi to get a reply, he scavenged some crackers from the pantry and spun the most likely response in his head. Matoba’d say yes, of course, and give him the specifics or try to set up a time for them to meet, and be vaguely infuriating all the while. Shuuichi at least hoped that Matoba (or his grandfather, more likely) had cleared it with the Agency first.

The answer he got did manage to surprise him, though. _‘No,’_ Matoba wrote. _‘This doesn’t have anything to do with work.’_

Shuuichi snorted. _‘Are you sure?’_

 _‘I am_ quite _sure. Suspicious, aren’t we? No, Natori-san, if the Matoba Corporation has any further need of your services as a bounty hunter, I assure you that there will be no way for you to mistake the request for anything else.’_

The look Shuuichi directed at his computer screen, the best proxy he had for the person on the other end of this ‘conversation,’ was a bemused one. _‘So you…_ ’ He paused, trying not to be overcome by the sheer bizarreness of the situation. _‘…want to talk with me.’_

 _‘Yes,’_ was Matoba’s simple reply.

“Why?!” Shuuichi exclaimed, and he asked Matoba exactly that, if a little less animatedly. Shuuichi couldn’t remember a single time when someone he’d terminated an android for had actually wanted to talk with him afterwards, especially outside of work. Most of them could barely string more than a couple of sentences together, their attention fixated on the twitching android on the floor or the pleading android being loaded into the back of an Agency van. The fact that Shuuichi was nearly always in exactly the same state didn’t help things on the communications front.

It seemed Matoba didn’t quite realize, though. _‘People talk with one another, don’t they? Especially when they’ve spoken with one another before; don’t tell me you forgot so quickly!’_

Oh, right, that time in the car. Shuuichi rubbed at the back of his neck. Talk had turned kind of personal there, hadn’t it… He read on: _‘Is it really so unbelievable that I would want to talk with you outside a professional setting? If you don’t want to, all you have to do is say so.’_

Somehow, Shuuichi doubted it would be quite that simple; Matoba hadn’t struck him as the sort to leave off pestering just because the pestered said ‘stop.’ But as he thought about it, Shuuichi decided he’d humor him. Rebuffing Matoba’s request to ‘talk’ ran the risk of hurting his standing with the Agency; that was certainly part of it. At the same time, though, Shuuichi couldn’t actually remember the last time someone had spoken to him outside of work and claimed not to want anything from him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to work up the will to talk to someone if he didn’t have to. There was novelty in that, at least.

 _‘Fine.’_ Shuuichi typed out in a reply message. He wouldn’t answer any questions too personal for his liking, and he wouldn’t steer the conversation in that direction. But surely Matoba had to realize that. _Heck, I can’t even think of anything to ask him about,_ he realized with some chagrin. _Well, this is just getting off to a great start, isn’t it!_ Instead, Shuuichi finished off with: _‘What do you want to talk about?’_

It was maybe five minutes before he got any sort of reply. Shuuichi couldn’t help but feel a little pleased by that; it seemed he wasn’t the only one who was having trouble thinking of what to say. When he finally got another notification in his inbox, the subject of the message was so mundane that Shuuichi scoffed and shook his head. _‘What is it like where you live?’_

 _‘Cold, dirty and crowded,’_ Shuuichi shot back, wondering if Matoba would recognize his own words. ‘ _Well, more cold and crowded than dirty, honestly. I live in an apartment complex in District 2, one of the low-rent ones. It’s built to house about 500, but I think we’ve got a bit more than that living here.’_ He paused and thought. It was, at least, a lot better than the flophouse he’d stayed in when he first moved to the city. No getting up at three in the morning to shower or constantly worrying about coming home and finding his room broken into, not here. The insulation was a lot better too, even if Shuuichi did find himself huddling under blankets in cold weather. Was he going to admit that he’d lived in a flophouse once upon a time? No. But all the same… _‘It’s better than some of the places I’ve lived. And you?’_

 _‘Clean and quiet,’_ was the confident reply. Shuuichi rolled his eyes but read on, ‘ _But that’s to be expected, I suppose, considering how fewer people there are here.’_

There came a dull thump on the ceiling, not from the floor directly above him, Shuuichi thought, but maybe two floors up. _‘Or maybe you’ve just got more space to put all of them. So no roommates, then?’_

_‘No, none. Families get multi-bedroom apartments; everyone else gets singles. And you?’_

_‘No, I haven’t got any roommates. The rent’s cheaper on single-bedroom apartments here.’_ Shuuichi frowned and peered at the message he’d written, before deleting all of the last sentence. In its place, he wrote, _‘I like my privacy.’_

_‘So you’re a shut-in?’_

_‘No, I’m not a shut-in! Where would you get an idea like that?!’_

_‘You just gave it to me.’_

_‘Well, you’re wrong. I spend all day outside when I’m working; that’s hardly the definition of a shut-in. Now, if you don’t mind, I can’t spend all night talking to you.’_ Shuuichi fired off that last e-mail, realizing too late how that could be taken. He tapped his finger against the edge of the table as he waited for a reply. _I really should have kept my cool there; he’s just annoying, not worth losing my temper over._ And _pissing him off could hurt me at work, big time._

The next reply came quick enough: _‘I think you protest a little too much! Until next time, then, Natori-san.’_

Shuuichi clapped a hand over his face, glaring at the computer screen. Sure, that was better than Matoba getting angry and signing off in a huff, but Shuuichi was pretty sure he was being laughed at. He _hated_ being laughed at.

­-0-0-0- 

He wouldn’t have gone inside the bar if he hadn’t seen the face on the holoposter outside. Shuuichi avoided going anywhere he wasn’t likely to find an android on principle, and seeing as they couldn’t drink alcohol and most of them didn’t eat, bars definitely counted as places androids seldom went. There was also the accusation of drinking on the job to think about, but the image the holoposter had flipped to wiped all that from his mind.

 _‘HERE RIGHT NOW!’_ the poster exclaimed in bold black letters. _‘Ono Kikyou, the sweet-voiced singing sensation!_ ’ Below the description there was an image of a pale-faced woman with bobbed red hair, blue-gray eyes and a long, aquiline nose.

Kikyou’s face looked familiar, tugged at the edge of Shuuichi’s mind. He stared at the holoposter for several moments, before things finally clicked into place. _I know where_ …

Every bounty hunter carried a small reader with a list of known escaped androids on it. Sure enough, Kikyou’s face showed up on the list, a Mark 5 who’d escaped from the Kyoto Syndicate over a year ago. That’d make her one of the longest-running escapees Shuuichi had come across—if, in fact, the woman on the holoposter was an android. The angles of the two photos were different, the photo in the reader straight forward while the photo on the image on the holoposter was a three-quarter shot. While it was illegal to purposely create an android identical to a particular human, it wouldn’t be the first time an android with an uncanny resemblance to a human had shown up. _I’ll have to get a closer look, then._

Reeking smoke hit him first, making Shuuichi cough and momentarily clap a hand over his mouth and nose. He stood just inside the doorway for a moment, struggling to gather his bearings. When he’d managed that, he looked around the smoky inside of the bar, eyes narrowed.

The lighting in the bar was dim; the windows were covered with solid red shades emblazoned outlined chrysanthemums. It didn’t help that the walls had been painted black; that would have made it seem dimmer than it actually was to start with, but it also served to make the room seem _smaller_ than it was as well, as though the walls were pressing in. To be honest, that wasn’t all that unusual for bars in the city (Or, at least, not the handful of bars Shuuichi had visited since reaching his majority). All the same, it still put Shuuichi on edge, still left him scanning the room, taking stock of the maybe twenty small round tables and the tired, rather pasty-faced patrons.

The patrons, thoroughly unaware of a bounty hunter’s presence in their midst, knocked back cheap liquor, nibbled half-heartedly on crackers or yakitori. There was the occasional flicker of orange flame from someone flipping their lighter on to light a cigarette—a clear violation of city health codes, and the miasma of smoke made Shuuichi’s head throb and his eyes sting so badly that he had to reach behind his glasses to scrub at them, but it wasn’t what he’d come here for. _Besides, the air outside doesn’t smell a whole lot better, some days_ , he allowed irritably. The servers all wore black shirts and slacks; they darted back and forth between the tables, the bar off to the right-hand side of the room, and a door to the far left that likely led to the kitchen. They must have been used to the smoke, and the dark, for they moved with complete surety.

There was a small stage set up on the opposite side of the room form the door, the brightest spot in the bar actually, bathed in dim white light. Over the stage was a sign that read, _‘Our last singer was Inoue Masayoshi. Ono Kikyou is on in 43 seconds. 42… 41…_ ’

 _Guess I’ll find out who she is soon enough_. Shuuichi leaned against the wall opposite the stage, his hands stuffed into his pockets.

“Excuse me, sir?” A waitress appeared at his shoulder, frowning up at him. “There are tables open.”

Shuuichi shook his head, and forced a bright smile on to his face. “I’m not here to drink.”

“Sir, we don’t allow loitering; I’m going to have to ask you to—“

“I’m here on business.” The smile dropped. Shuuichi flashed his ID at her, and watched as her eyes widened. “I’m going to need to speak with your manager in a few minutes.”

The waitress scurried away, shooting Shuuichi a huge-eyed look over her shoulder. Shuuichi tried to ignore the fear he had seen on her face, told himself that the increased throbbing over his left eye was down to the smoke, and redirected his attention to the stage.

 _‘…5…4…3…2…1…’_ The sign reached the end of its countdown, and barely a moment later a woman walked out onto the stage from a small side door to the left of it, smiling brightly in response to the applause and scattered cheers that went up from her audience. It was Kikyou, alright—pale face, long nose, short red hair that fell sleek and straight to her jaw. And when she stood looking straight ahead…

_It’s her._

Oh, it was her, alright, but there was a complication. As Kikyou began to sing, Shuuichi spotted several tattoos on her right shoulders and upper arm, clearly visible through the sheer fabric of her sleeve, all made out in the shape of chrysanthemums. A quick look at her entry on the reader confirmed that she had had no such identifying markings when she escaped from the manufacturing plant where she worked.

 _That’s right, some of them are clever enough to exploit that. Get slapped with an identifying mark when you’re made? Get five more when you escape, and now no one can kill you outright because you don’t match the profile anymore_. The same sort of thing that could separate an android from the crowd of humans around them—and, indeed, some androids were given tattoo-like markings at the time of their creation, though not usually anywhere that could be easily covered up by clothing—could be used to muddy the waters even more than they already had been. Shuuichi’s hand went to his right sleeve, fingers clutching self-consciously at the fabric.

Kikyou had thrown herself into her singing with abandon. Whoever had made the poster outside hadn’t been joking when they called her ‘sweet-voiced’—her voice was smooth and even, a bit deeper than Shuuichi thought was typical for a woman, but no less lovely for that. This was, it seemed, a karaoke bar; none of the words were her own. But the audience, raptly attentive as they were, likely cared no more about that with her than they did with anyone else who got on that stage.

_And you said ‘You’re mine’  
But I said ‘No time’_

All she was doing… was singing. That was it. Shuuichi had no idea of she was even being paid for it or not; judging from the fact that she was wearing all-black clothing, she might have been a waitress here when she wasn’t up on the stage. Just singing, and maybe serving drinks and food when she wasn’t doing that. Unless Kikyou’s activities spread to a more unsavory sphere, she wasn’t hurting anyone, just standing up there, singing.

 _Don’t feel anything for someone who can’t feel anything for you._ The words intruded like a foghorn blaring through the crowd, and with them came reality. In the eyes of the world, Kikyou had already done so much harm simply by escaping that the only remedy was death. The only prescription for an escaped android was death, unless their corporation actively wanted them back, and few did—a runner once was a runner always. There was only one job for him.

“Sir?” The same waitress from before walked up to him, an anxious look firmly fixed to her face. “Come with me; the manager wants to speak with you.”

Shuuichi was led away from the bar itself and through the narrow door off to the left of the stage, into what looked like a breakroom. A black plastic table sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by black plastic folding chairs. The walls were painted dark red rather than black; two vending machines stood in the back corner of the room. The pall of smoke was no better here than it was outside; Shuuichi coughed and rubbed at his eyes. _How do they pass inspections?_

The waitress shut the door behind her, and all the noise from the bar was abruptly silenced. Shuuichi’s eyes lit on a tall, dark-haired man dressed all in black like the rest of the staff, whose eyes darted to and fro.

“Natori Shuuichi,” Shuuichi introduced himself, not bothering to smile this time; he had a feeling it wouldn’t make much difference with this man.

“Miki Akira,” the other man replied, a touch brusquely. “I’m the day shift manager here. What did you want to talk about?”

“The woman out on stage—how long has she been working here?”

“Kikyou?” The name came out stunned and taut. “A few months. She’s a good worker, always cheerful. Sings well. She’s… She’s nice.” Miki’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want with her?”

Shuuichi stuffed his hands back into his pockets. “I have reason to believe that Ono Kikyou is an escaped android from the Kyoto Syndicate.”

The look that sparked in Miki’s eyes was almost… panicked. “Kikyou? No, that’s… She can’t be…”

“She matches the description of a Mark 5 android escaped from the Kyoto Syndicate down to every detail, except for the tattoos on her arm,” Shuuichi pressed, trying and failing to ignore Miki’s mounting distress. “I need to give her the Voight-Kampff test before proceeding any further. If the results are positive, I’ll call for a car to take her back to Agency headquarters for confirmation.” Miki’s face contorted and Shuuichi added, “But if the test turns up negative, of course there will be no further problems.”

Miki nodded choppily. “S-She’ll be back here in a minute; I don’t—“

Just then, the door swung open. All the noise silenced by the door shutting came back in full, the sounds of scattered applause ringing in Shuuichi’s ears.

Shuuichi and Miki’s eyes snapped to the open doorway. Kikyou stood there sporting a huge grin, hand braced on the lintel. “They really liked that one; did you hear?” Even when simply speaking, her voice still sounded musical, as though she was still singing. “I think they want me to go on for another…” She trailed off, staring between Shuuichi and Miki. “Akira, what’s wrong?” she asked him, her voice laced with concern. “You’ve gone all pale. And who’s this?”

“Kikyou, sit down,” Miki said stiffly, pressing his hand down hard on the back of one of the chairs.

Her wide eyes fixed on Miki, Kikyou sat down. She sat very straight, resting her arms on the table. “What’s going on?” Triumph had left her voice a while ago, and concern gave way to wariness with those words.

Miki said nothing; his knuckles were white on the back of her chair.

Shuuichi took a seat opposite her and pulled his Voight-Kampff kit out from his coat pocket. As he did so, he noticed for the first time a glass ash tray sitting on the table, littered with cigarette butts. He pushed it away and flashed a wide smile at Kikyou, who drew back slightly in her chair. “Ono-san, I need to run a test on you. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

“What kind of test?” That wariness was still there, in a voice that sounded set to snap like a violin string wound too tight, in blue-gray eyes that flicked momentarily to the device Shuuichi was setting up even as they spoke.

“It’s called the Voight-Kampff test,” Shuuichi explained, not meeting her gaze. The device needed careful attention, after all… “It measures eye and other facial movements while a subject is asked a series of questions.”

“Voight-Kampff,” Kikyou muttered, frowning. “But that’s…” Recognition flashed starkly in her eyes. “But I’m not an android,” she protested.

Shuuichi lined the device up with her eyes. “Hold still,” he told her, the smile fading from his lips entirely. His stomach began to twist, just a little. “If you’re not an android, then this should be over soon. Now—“ Shuuichi pressed the ‘record’ button “—state your name.”

“Ono Kikyou.”

“Date of birth?”

“August twenty-ninth, 2029.”

“Your preferred pronouns.”

“Ah… She, hers.”

“Alright, then, question one…”

Kikyou certainly claimed that she was no android. The results of the test, however, were damning.

She stared at Shuuichi, her face gone stiff and still. “There has to be a mistake. Akira, tell hi—“

Miki left the breakroom, never once looking back. He slammed the door behind him. Kikyou stared, stricken, at the closed door. Shuuichi knew that look—it was the look of someone who’d just watched their best (last, only) hope walk out the door. He drew a deep breath, his fingers slipping over the Voight-Kampff device as he slowly disassembled it and packed it away in its brown case. He was always clumsier putting it away than he was setting it up. The smoke didn’t help.

“What happens now?” Kikyou asked woodenly, staring dull-eyed down at her lap. There was no trace of music in her voice now. “Are you going to kill me?”

Shuuichi gave a start. “No,” he said, “I’m not. I’m going to call for someone to pick you up and take you back to Agency headquarters so they can confirm if you’re really an android or not. The test can be fooled, after all.”

“Hmm.” Kikyou didn’t sound terribly interested. She didn’t latch on to the possibility that she might have accidentally fooled the test. Most androids didn’t. The ones who didn’t run or attack, they just folded, like her.

They were probably both thinking the same thing: that crowd wasn’t going to be getting another song out of her.

-0-0-0- 

_‘Have you ever been to the beach?’_

_‘No. I grew up in the mountains; we didn’t have enough free time to travel much. Have_ you _ever been to the beach?’_

 _‘No, and for much the same reason as you. I’ve only been here for about two years now, Natori-san. My grandfather’s health does not bear traveling far, and I’ve usually too much to do to travel far myself. But in all the years you’ve been here, you’ve never gone to the beach yourself? Even if everyone in your family worked, I should think that there was at least_ one _occasion when you and your parents could have gone.’_

_‘Think again. Some of us don’t ever get that much free time.’_

_‘Fair. Well, if you’re so short on free time, you must spend much of it working. So how is work for you?’_

_‘I don’t want to talk about that.’_

_‘Really? Even if you can’t tell me specifics, there must be someone you can say about it.’_

_‘Well, there isn’t. Is there a whole lot you want to say about your work?’_

_‘Not really. It’s just moments of scanning and e-mailing and fetch-and-carry interspersed with meetings where I’m just supposed to listen as opposed to actually contributing anything.’_

_‘That’s my point. There’s nothing to talk about when it comes to work.’_

_‘I got the impression you rather disliked your work, actually.’_

_‘Leave it alone, Matoba.’_

_‘Oh?’_

_‘Yes. Leave it alone.’_

_‘Alright. Until next time, then.’_

_‘Yeah.’_

-0-0-0- 

_‘Do you think we’ll get snow this year?’_

_‘Look up a weather report. Why are you asking me?’_

_‘I was just curious to know what you thought. You’ve lived her longer than I have; I thought you might have an idea.’_

_‘Well, I don’t. I’m not a weatherman. Also, I’m sending you a link.’_

_‘”Japan’s Most Reliable Weather News?” The site ads certainly are_ interesting _. Are you certain that this is a reputable site?’_

_‘Positive. I’ve been using it for a year and a half now. I don’t think it’s been wrong more than twice.’_

_‘Well, thank you, Natori-san.’_

_‘Sure. Anything to keep you from enduring the **horrors** of a rainy day with no umbrella.’_

-0-0-0- 

_‘It says here that it will snow next week.’_

_‘Fantastic. Just the kind of weather I want to be walking around all day in.’_

_‘You don’t like snow, Natori-san? Is your inner child_ that _dead and buried?’_

 _‘I never_ had _an inner child, thank you. And I like snow fine when I can limit how much contact I have with it and I don’t have to drive in it.’_

_‘Honestly, I’ve always found sleet more difficult to drive in. But I understand as regards to having to be outside in it. Winters here are much milder than Martian winters, but they’re still too cold for my tastes.’_

_‘You’ve got no stamina, then.’_

_‘I have plenty, just not for the cold.’_

_‘Sure. But if it does snow, I hope it’s the powdery kind. I always liked that kind best.’_

-0-0-0-

As proof perhaps that someone upstairs did still occasionally listen to Natori Shuuichi, the snow did, at first, come down powdery, before the wet snows children loved for their snowball fights came down after it. But whoever had been listening must have had an especially malicious sense of humor.

“You should get that bandaged,” Hiiragi said bluntly, pointing to Shuuichi’s bleeding hand before rubbing her own together, standing stiff and straight against the bitterly cold wind.

Shuuichi examined his hand more closely. The android had shoved him back when he tried to run; Shuuichi had fallen back into the alley and cut his hand open on the glittering shards of glass littering the ground. Cold as it was, he could barely even feel how his hand stung (the glass shards had been sitting below water; that helped), but still, he grimaced unhappily at the numerous cuts on his hand. “Probably have to get a ton of shots, too,” he muttered.

“Yup,” Hiiragi agreed. She tugged at the surgical mask she constantly wore over the lower half of her face.

Shuuichi blinked at her. “Isn’t this the part where you tell me, ‘No, Natori, it’ll all be fine without you having to get eight shots’?” he asked, trying for jokey, coming out with wry.

“If I did that, you’d never go to the hospital, and then they’d have to amputate your hand when you got an infection.”

“Ah, you do have a point there.”

By chance, they’d been assigned to patrol the same district today, and when Shuuichi and Hiiragi had spotted each other in the crowd (the former spotting the latter easily, from dyed-white hair with blondish roots), they’d agreed readily enough to patrol together. Hiiragi was one of only a few of Shuuichi’s co-workers with whom he was on consistently good terms; it wasn’t much of a hardship to him.

And, lo and behold, they’d spotted a face identical to one on the target screen at work. But not one who was willing to be herded into the back of a van, or to die quietly.

As Shuuichi found his eyes irresistibly drawn to the fallen android, any semblance of levity left him. The android lied on the ground at the mouth of the alley, deathly still except for the moments, increasingly scarce, when it would twitch, electrical impulses sent from the brain down dead limbs. “I… don’t suppose your car’s nearby.”

“I don’t _have_ a car, Natori.”

“And I left mine in the garage. I should call for a van, then.”

“I already did that.” Hiiragi leveled a narrow-eyed look at him. “I told you.”

“Oh.”

She scuffed her foot on a clump of grayish snow. “You been getting enough sleep?”

Shuuichi stared at her, wondering what had brought on this line of reasoning. “Yeah. Why?”

Hiiragi shrugged. “Nothing, kid. You’ve just got that look.”

With nothing to do but wait for an Agency van to show up, Shuuichi edged closer to the mouth of the alley. The android’s eyes were shut. That was a relief, considering that most of them tended to die with their eyes wide open instead. At least this one wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t staring up at him with eyes that pleaded or accused or cried…

The street outside the alley, however, was not empty, and while there were some who just hurried by, most of the passersby did plenty of staring.

Their eyes went first to the android, and huge, horrified and fascinated they were, unable to tear their eyes away for a small eternity. The only way most of them likely ever saw androids was just like this, dead on the ground while no one made a move to help as they might’ve done if the body was bleeding instead of short-circuiting, and yet still they stared, as though they’d never seen the like before (Shuuichi still stared sometimes, so maybe he just wasn’t any better).

Then, their eyes turned to him. Some made eye contact only briefly before scurrying away, hands going to their hats or their scarves or their coat collars. Some gawked at him as though he was just as much the same as the android—some rare specimen no one ever saw out of captivity, wild and wary and dangerous. Shuuichi met their gaze with his shoulders hunched, sometimes smiling just out of habit, sometimes not, but neither way no one seemed able to hold eye contact with him for long.

Across the street, a holoposter alternated between three different ads. One: An offer of low-rent apartment space to the young of the city, ‘going fast!’ Two: a company that rented out plastic flowers for ‘weddings, wakes and everything in-between!’, sporting a vase filled with glossy lilies. Three: An image of an android with naked wiring in with a crowd of humans. A huge eye hovers overhead: when open, all is in color but the android; when shut, the reverse.

Snow drifted down from the dim skies above, light gray, and darker, and darker, until you saw snow that was almost black with soot. The sight of it made the cold seep deeper and deeper into Shuuichi’s bones, until he was sure he’d breathe frost.

(This had to be better than being put on processing duty. It had to be better than being fired. Had to be.)

­-0-0-0-

There was no message waiting in his inbox when he got home, not from Matoba, from work, from some scam artist trying to con money from him, or from anyone else. No, Shuuichi was trying something new today. Surely if Matoba was willing to shoot him random messages, the reverse would be acceptable. He couldn’t possibly complain; it was what he’d claimed he wanted, wasn’t it?

Shuuichi stared distractedly at the empty message box open on his computer screen. The memory of twitching limbs sprang to mind. Then eyes that flickered up and down, terrified and revolted and transfixed. The dripping blood and whispers and car horns and the reek of gasoline only faintly muted by the bitter cold and—

_‘Is it snowing where you are?’_

Not even a full minute later, a reply turned up in his inbox. _‘Well, yes. I’m only an hour away from you, and only because of the traffic. Of course it’s snowing where I am.’_

 _‘I’_ Shuuichi drew a deep breath, nostrils flaring. He rubbed his head against his forehead, wincing at the feel of bandages against skin and glad he’d never set his computer up with video-mail. He was glad to not have to show his face tonight. _‘really hate winter. The snow never lasts long; it just turns to mush and makes the roads impossible to drive on. The snow’s not even white anymore because we’ve screwed up the planet so badly that even the snow with soot and smog and who knows what else. It’s miserable.’_

Matoba took longer, much longer, actually, than he usually did to reply. Around fifteen minutes or so passed before there was breathed even a word of his response. As the time passed, Shuuichi felt increasingly embarrassed by what he’d written. Even if he’d only talked about snow (the most mundane topic imaginable under the circumstances), he still felt as though he’d revealed far too much. At the very least, he expected some sort of ridicule over getting so worked up about _snow_.

Then, a new message popped up in his inbox. Shuuichi sighed ( _I suppose I’ll just have to take my licks_ ) and opened it.

 _‘There are many things I don’t miss about winters on Mars_ ,’ Matoba wrote. _‘The winters lasted six Mars months in the southern hemisphere; you can get very tired of it after a while—even my father did, and he loved winter. It was at times so cold that no matter how high the heaters were set, I don’t think I ever felt truly warm. We also had to switch to sonic showers because of the stress on the water reclamation systems (sonic showers never really leave the user with a sense of_ cleanliness _), and the dust storms would block out the sun for days at a time. I will say, however, that the virgae were always white, even if they didn’t last very long. Martian winters definitely have the advantage over winters on Earth in that.’_

It wasn’t the mocking reply Shuuichi had feared; he stared at the message, frowning. Instead, it looked almost… _‘Virgae?’_ Shuuichi prompted, hoping to make sense of the unfamiliar term.

_‘Oh, that’s what we call the snow on Mars. The snow is water-based in the northern hemisphere and carbon dioxide-based in the south.’_

_‘Carbon dioxide snow?’_ Shuuichi asked, interested almost in spite of himself. He hadn’t intended to be curious about anything tonight, but apparently instinct had overwhelmed intention. But Martian snow (of all the things he could have been talking to someone about, he’d somehow come up with Martian snow?) was a safe enough topic. That was probably why. _‘How does that work?’_

 _‘Don’t know. They explained it to us in physical science class, but I never paid much attention in that one._ ’

Shuuichi rolled his eyes. “Of course.” No matter. He’d look it up himself later. He turned his attention to the rest of the message:

_‘As I have said before, I don’t like the cold. Actually, I much prefer spring to winter, especially here. It’s always nice to see things growing outside again.’_

_‘Including your plastic flowers?’_ Shuuichi fired back.

After another long while, there came a reply. _‘Yes, I do like flowers, even if I don’t often get the chance to see real ones. Personally, I’m not sure why you would think the plastic ones are inferior just because they aren’t real plants.’_

 _‘Maybe because they’re **fake**.’ _ Shuuichi did not pretend to understand what Matoba had seen in that artificial park. Even someone raised on Mars must have been able to spot a pretty significant difference in quality between real flowers and flowers made of polyester cloth and wire. _‘I like autumn better than winter, even if I don’t get much of a chance to appreciate it here—autumn here’s pretty lousy too.’_ He peered at the screen, before adding, _‘What is spring on Mars like?’_ and sending the message on.

He could just as easily have found that out by looking it up on the net; Shuuichi knew that. An article about Martian seasons probably would have been more comprehensive than any explanation Matoba Seiji gave him, considering the man couldn’t remember anything about how the snow on half of his home planet was formed. But he found he’d rather just hear it from him.

_‘As to the flowers, you have no imagination, Natori-san.’_

“Maybe because I’ve actually seen real flowers,” Shuuichi muttered to himself, but without any real ire.

 _‘And we both seem to like transitional seasons, too,’_ Matoba went on. _‘Interesting. But springs on Mars aren’t that different from any other season. It’s not like the scenery changes from season to season. The town where I lived had a pastime of painting and re-painting the sides of buildings when the seasons changed—public buildings let us paint them and so did some of the local businesses. I was never able to do so myself while I was still in school, but I never found work after high school and college was further away than my parents wanted me to travel, so I was at loose ends, and I could participate then. My mother was a painter and her schedule was erratic, so we would go together. She enjoyed it.’_

Shuuichi leaned into the back of his chair, gazing pensively at the screen. _‘And you miss it.’_

_‘Sometimes.’_

_…_

_‘I’m sorry.’_

_‘Thank you. But it was a long time ago.’_


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To the maybe half-dozen of you who are actually reading this, this is the only Christmas present I know to give you. Don’t thank me yet.
> 
> The warnings from chapter one still apply, but I’m adding a couple of new ones specially for this chapter. The warnings for this chapter are: suicide; descriptions of severe bodily injuries. With that in mind, let’s get to the chapter.

There were no more e-mails, not a single word for the next two weeks. After a while, Shuuichi began to wonder if he hadn’t managed to scare Matoba off. He honestly hadn’t thought that that was possible, and for the first few days, he told himself, if a bit wryly, that he’d managed to get rid of a particularly stubborn pest. But after a few more days of the same routine, over and over again, patrolling, looking for androids, finding one and then dealing with the fall-out of that (more images of twitching limbs and staring lingering behind his eyelids), and then coming home to his dark, quiet apartment, he found himself missing getting messages in his inbox from someone who actually wanted to talk to him for once.

 _Guess he finally got bored of someone who didn’t have anything interesting to say,_ Shuuichi thought to himself, a little disappointed in spite of himself when he got home in the evening and once again found his inbox empty.

Then, the phone rang, the sharp, claxon-like tone cutting crisply through the silence. _Don’t recognize the number_ , Shuuichi mused as he put the phone to his ear. “This is Natori Shuuichi,” he said, forcing a calm tone of voice. “Can I help you?”

A familiar voice answered him. “Natori-san. You sound well.”

Shuuichi found a smile spreading across his lips, not one of the automatic ones he used to try to put strangers at ease or convince conversation partners that he was trustworthy, but smaller and softer. “Haven’t heard from you in a while. Did you decide e-mail was too boring, then?”

“Ah.” There was a hint of laughter in Matoba’s voice, though quickly suppressed. “Alas, this is not a personal call. I am calling you on behalf of the Matoba Corporation. I have a job for you, if you’ll take it.”

“Oh.” A knot formed in Shuuichi’s stomach as he sat down on the couch. “Of course. What’s the job?”

“We’ve had two more androids escape from one of our facilities recently, and a profile of each of them was put together earlier today. Are you interested?”

Shuuichi thought to himself that he was _still_ quite content to keep patrolling and not go out of his way to take any special assignments. What came out instead was, “…Yes, I am. I’ll have to clear it with my superiors first, though.”

“Already done,” Matoba replied confidently. “We placed a call just after five; they seemed quite, uh, _eager_ to send you off. All that remains is your assent.”

Shuuichi sighed a bit. _Why are you people always going over my head? Is that really necessary?_ “Alright.” He supposed he would just have to trust that no one was trying to run a number on him. He hadn’t gotten the impression that Matoba—or his grandfather, for that matter—was stupid enough to think that he could get away with something like that. “Where were the androids last sighted, and when were they last sighted?”

“District Four. They seem to be sticking together.”

 _Together… That’s just…_ Shuuichi grimaced as he digested that particular bit of information. Androids traveling in groups, even if only in pairs, tended to present _difficulties_ , provided they didn’t betray or desert each other, which presented problems in itself. Even androids who had escaped in groups tended not to stay in groups for very long, so it was difficult to guess what they would do. “Together, huh?” he said, more to himself than to Matoba.

“Yes.” Matoba’s voice sharpened almost imperceptibly. “Will that be a problem?”

“I don’t know.” Shuuichi rubbed his forehead. “It could be. Right. Bring the profiles to my apartment tomorrow morning—I _know_ you know where I live; don’t bother trying to deny it. Does Matoba-san want you shadowing me this time, too?”

“That’s right.” Shuuichi heard Matoba sound a quiet laugh. “Is _that_ going to be a problem?”

Another smile crept over Shuuichi’s face. “No, it’s not. Just don’t wear a suit. Where we’re going, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb if you dress like that. Oh, and bring an umbrella. There’s no awnings.”

-0-0-0-

It was early the next morning, just after seven, when Shuuichi got a knock on his front door. “Already?” Shuuichi said to himself, frowning bemusedly. He’d expected early contact, but not quite this early. _At least I’m already dressed; sure would be awkward to have to answer the door in my pajamas._ “I’m coming,” he called, crossing the living room to the door, and opening it. He blinked, and stared.

Okay, Shuuichi knew he’d told Matoba to dress casually. But somehow, he hadn’t expected Matoba’s definition of ‘casual’ to include a ratty sweatshirt, checkered scarf and jeans. And a bright red umbrella. (Subtle.) Suddenly, Shuuichi didn’t feel quite as underdressed in his old coat and hat standing next to him as he had before. It felt… odd, seeing him again. They’d been communicating over e-mail for a while now, but it was only the third time they had met in person. His facial features seemed softer than Shuuichi remembered, though he wasn’t sure if that was his memory distorting fact or if it was down to the rare morning sunlight erasing hard lines like it was wont to do. “…Good morning,” he said lamely.

There was a flash of something sharp and bright in Matoba’s eyes as he looked him over. “Good morning.” He pulled out a small reader from his sweatshirt pocket, likely the same he had had at the first assignment. “I believe this contains all the information you will—“

Shuuichi grabbed Matoba’s shoulder and hastily pulled him inside, shutting the door firmly behind them. “Not out there,” he muttered, frowning at Matoba, who just smirked back. _Oh, so is_ that _your game?_ “My neighbors don’t know what I do. Besides, do you really think this is the sort of thing you talk about in hallways?”

“No,” Matoba agreed blandly. “But you seemed rather determined to have a conversation out in the hallway.”

Shuuichi said nothing, and held his hand out for the reader. Matoba’s smirk widened slightly, and he handed it over.

The androids were both Mark 6, both male in construction. They had named themselves Takeo and Aoi. The two androids looked very much alike, both brown-haired and brown-eyed with soft, youthful facial features—they looked so much alike, in fact, that they could easily have passed for brothers—but Aoi was significantly larger in stature than Takeo. Takeo himself had a salient identifying mark, a vestige of his escape. Apparently one of the guards had thought to shoot at the androids as they fled—a bullet grazed Takeo’s right forearm, exposing a stretch of his wiring. That would help in identification, though only if Shuuichi could get a good look at Takeo’s arm.

“I don’t suppose you know anything about _where_ in District Four the androids were last sighted,” Shuuichi remarked when he finished looking through the profiles, and found nothing more specific about location than ‘last sighted in District Four.’

Matoba shook his head. “No. As far as we can tell, they’ve stayed on the move since escaping.”

Shuuichi grimaced. _Great._ “Then we’d better start looking.”

“You seem unenthused.”

“You’ve never been to District Four before, have you?”

“No, but how bad can it be? One district is much like another in this city, isn’t it?”

Shuuichi let out a barking laugh and started rooting around for his supplies. Voight-Kampff kit, check. Gun, check. Glasses, check. Keys, umbrella, hat, check. “Come on. We’re taking the bus. There’s not a whole lot of parking around District Four, and what there is is… not nice. I _don’t_ wanna come back and find my car’s been jacked.”

-0-0-0-

Shuuichi didn’t visit District Four often when off-duty, not compared to the other districts (Though to be perfectly honest he didn’t go visiting the other districts a lot, either). In fact, he preferred to have as little contact with District Four as possible. There were too many people and too little shelter outside for his liking.

District Four was an extremely congested commercial district, both in terms of shops and of people. The human population in that district, in fact, had grown so great that the roads had been shut down, and were open for use only by vehicles authorized to do so by the local government. The first things you noticed when you got to District Four were the press of bodies, the commingled odor of sweat, gasoline (even if there were very few cars in District Four, that acrid smell hung over the whole city), perfume, food cooking and more, the sheer _noise_ of thousands upon thousands of voices competing with each other to be heard.

In District Four there were hundreds if not thousands of stores, selling everything you could possibly want. Holobooks, food, clothes, toys, auto parts, furniture, antiques, it was all there. All of the stores were packed into massive, block-like buildings that typically stood at least ten stories high and were all hollow on the inside—you could stand on the tenth floor and look all the way down to the first. Catwalks crisscrossed the empty space, looking like a mangled spider web from the ground. Only stores on the ground floor were accessible from the streets. Shuuichi had heard that those stores were incredibly costly to rent or lease, but nevertheless they were popular real estate; empty spaces rarely stayed empty for long.

When they got off the bus, Matoba eyed his surroundings with intense interest, casting his gaze to the looming gray buildings before them. When he first had to navigate the pressing, jostling crowds, however, his expression became considerably more ambivalent. “It certainly is lively,” he remarked, pulling his umbrella closer to his side.

Shuuichi turned his head so Matoba couldn’t see him rolling his eyes. “Welcome to District Four.” At least the cold cut out the worst of the musty odor of sweat you usually picked up here. “Stay close to me. I don’t want you to get lost.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I bet your grandfather would have a fit if you got lost here,” Shuuichi added hastily. “You’re acting like a tourist; with the people here, that’s like spilling blood in a shark tank.”

Matoba looked skeptically at the people around them. “I can handle myself, I _assure_ you.”

“Well, there’s also the fact that if we split up and you spot our targets—“ Shuuichi didn’t think anyone was paying a whole lot of attention to them, but he still knew better than to let on that they were looking for androids around so many people “—before I do, all you can do is call me and wait. You’re not allowed to engage them yourself, remember?” he said pointedly.

“I suppose so,” Matoba replied in the sort of tone that made Shuuichi think that he wasn’t taking things nearly as seriously as he ought to be. On second thought, there wasn’t really _any_ telling if Matoba took anything seriously or not—at least, nothing that told on his face.

“Right. I know a few hotspots we ought to look at first. The closest one’s a couple of blocks away, but keep your eyes _open_ on the way.”

They made their way slowly through the throng, Shuuichi periodically looking behind to make sure Matoba was still following him. The latter wasn’t saying a whole lot, instead drinking in his surroundings with renewed interest. He clearly wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to the search—Matoba might have been studying the people around him, but it was with the fascination of someone who’d clearly never been here or anywhere like here before. His eyes went to the vendors’ carts parked out in the streets, to a couple of tattoo artists standing outside the door to their parlor, advertising their talents simply by showing off their heavily tattooed arms.

Shuuichi couldn’t quite bring himself to snap Matoba out of it. _Give him a few minutes, and the novelty will have worn off,_ he told himself. He eyed his companion, who was drinking in his surroundings with such avid interest, eyes shining brightly, and he felt almost… Almost as if this was all new again. The feeling wouldn’t last for long, Shuuichi knew that, but it was… nice, while it did. _At least_ someone’s _enjoying themselves._

It began to rain, in droplets that might have fallen gently but still stung when they made contact with skin. Anyone unlucky enough to be caught without an umbrella or a heavy coat yelped and dove inside one of the stores. The rain grew louder and louder in its pattering, the more umbrellas it found to fall against. Otherwise, life went on. Vendors still sold wares from their carts; the signs in the windows of each store still read ‘open.’ The familiar graffiti on the sides of the buildings, marigolds, clover, the occasional blue flower whose name Shuuichi didn’t know, still peeked out from alleyways for all to see, fading fast thanks to the rain. Panhandlers gathered in the streets, asking for money or food (Or, sometimes, more surreptitiously, for drugs—some even asked for alcohol, though Shuuichi wasn’t sure where they thought they were going to find someone willing to part with alcohol out here; it was too expensive to just give away).

Shuuichi set to studying the face in the crowd, seeing if any matched Takeo’s or Aoi’s. Unfortunately, brown hair and brown eyes weren’t at all unusual here, and most people were wearing long sleeves today, so Shuuichi couldn’t look for the glint of exposed wiring. _Acid rain_ can _damage an android’s skin. Are Mark 6s still vulnerable to that?_ After a while, he looked behind him and saw that Matoba had finally stopped just _looking_ around and had adopted a more watchful air. Good. It was better to have more than one pair of eyes looking, in a place like this. “Hey…”

“Yes?”

“…Nothing. There’s the building we should look in first, coming up on the right.”

It was hardly any less crowded in the shopping building than it was outside, and the echoing clamor was nearly deafening. _I hate these places_ , Shuuichi thought irritably to himself, as he put his umbrella away in a locker. _It’s so disorienting that an android could walk right by me and I’d be too busy trying to get my bearings to notice._ He had to get his bearings pretty quickly, though, when he spotted Matoba casually ambling into the mall proper without him. “What did I say about wandering off?” Shuuichi asked when he caught up to him. He couldn’t quite act like he hadn’t seen this coming, but he still raised a quizzical eyebrow at Matoba.

For himself, Matoba shot a sharp smirk back. “I wasn’t wandering off anywhere, Natori-san. Your concern is noted, though.”

“ _Sure._ Let’s get moving. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

The use of surveillance drones to monitor for crime in progress or other human crises such as someone having a heart attack or a stroke in public had been outlawed in Japan over twenty years ago, lawmakers citing certain… _abuses_ on the parts of drone operators as the reason for the ban. There were times, though, when Shuuichi thought they would have come in handy tracking down escaped androids. The latest drones overseas had self-sustaining power cells and could perfectly match faces against criminal databases. As much as he didn’t want to pass by a window and see one of those drones peering in, it would make this process much easier. Much less collateral damage that way. (Though the part of him that just wanted to stay on routine patrol was rather _glad_ that the powers that be hadn’t brought the drones back.)

With just two pairs of human eyes searching, of course it was going to take longer to get anything done, but that was just the way it was going to have to be, Shuuichi supposed. He and Matoba slowly combed through each store, looking for anyone who might Takeo or Aoi’s descriptions. There were a few who from a distance looked like they could have been them, but a closer look inevitably proved the look-alike to be just that—a look-alike. _Considering androids are_ supposed _to be easily identifiable, you’d think whoever was in charge of designs wouldn’t have made these two so generic-looking_.

First floor gave way to second, to third, to fourth. Shuuichi certainly saw more holobooks, more children’s toys, more overpriced designer clothes than he had in a while, but no androids. Moreover, he suspect a certain someone was getting bored, because about every five minutes Matoba would stop and comment on something that had caught his eye. At first, that ‘something’ had been passersby who looked like they possibly could have been one of the two androids, but over time, that ‘something’ devolved to a movie being advertised on a holoposter, a couple of teenagers constantly going in and out of the hurricane simulator, a deeply-vexed looked snake sitting in the front window of a pet store. This time, he stopped in front of a display case housing a growth of purple orchids in a porcelain pot, peering intently inside.

“Do you suppose these are real?” Matoba murmured, pressing his fingertips against the glass as a fascinated, oddly soft look stole over his face.

“Real flowers in a display case?” Shuuichi pointed out skeptically. “I hope not.” He cast a long look at Matoba’s face, before tearing his gaze away and directing it to the orchids instead. They had to be a facsimile; there was no way they could be real. Shuuichi stared searchingly at the orchids, until at last he spotted what he was looking for. “Look, there’s a seam,” he said, pointing at the base of one of the flowers.

“Ah.” For a moment, Matoba sounded almost disappointed, but when Shuuichi looked at him, his face was expressionless. “You’re right; no one would leave real flowers out in a display case.”

Shuuichi rubbed the back of his neck, at a loss for what to say. What was it with S… with _Matoba_ and fake flowers? Most people he knew could spot a fake one a mile off, even if it was a good fake, like those orchids. Most people made use of cloth or plastic flowers if they had _need_ of them, but wouldn’t give them the time of day otherwise—they weren’t _real_ , after all. Maybe it was just that where he’d grown up, there wasn’t any natural plant life at all. That sort of thing could probably skew your perceptions a bit. Make it more difficult to tell.

-0-0-0-

Around the seventh floor, they stopped to rest outside the door of a cosmetics store. There had been no more sign of the two androids, and though Shuuichi was still scanning the sea of faces for a familiar one, he was grateful to just be able to lean against the wall for a minute.

Beside him, Matoba still stood very straight and very still, but a small frown had come over his face as he stared across the empty space to the other side of the floor. “What’s wrong?” Shuuichi asked him.

“I am…” Matoba paused, then turned a questioning look on Shuuichi “…curious as to why you didn’t just ask to look at the building’s surveillance feeds. I had assumed that you had specific stores you wanted to check, but if you were planning to go through the whole building, looking at camera feeds would be rather more time-saving than just searching the building.” His tone sharpened. “Or so _I_ think.”

Shuuichi met his gaze squarely. “Yes, that would be quicker, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, unless I have proof positive that an android is working or living in a certain building, I can’t _make_ the people in charge do anything. It all depends on what they’re willing to do, and I speak from experience when I say that no one’s going to let you look at surveillance feeds if you don’t have proof.”

“So this is what you do if you don’t have a specific location? Just walk around and hope you spot your target?” There was no mistaking the skepticism in Matoba’s voice, or the note of disapproval buried beneath it.

“Sounds like a waste of time to you, doesn’t it? Well, maybe next time you can—“ Shuuichi stopped short when he saw Matoba’s mouth suddenly start to twitch in what looked awfully like amusement. “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

Matoba shook his head. “Nothing. It’s just that you must be more patient than I had given you credit for, if this is what you do every day. But suppose they don’t show up at any of the places you want to check. What, then? Searching the entirety of District Four could take days, and they could be long gone by then.”

Shuuichi smiled grimly. “Welcome to my life.” The smile faded quickly from his lips. “If we don’t find them at any of the hotspots, we just keep looking through the rest of the district. Unless you get an updated report or your grandfather wants to bring in more people, yes, it’s going to take days. We don’t have a better way than this.” He took of his glasses, rubbing dust away with his shirt sleeve.

 _Great big waste of time for two androids that probably aren’t even hurting anyone_. Not for one second did Shuuichi believe that if either Takeo or Aoi had been indulging in violence since their escape, that it wouldn’t have come up in their profiles. So they were probably out there right now, trying to scrape out a living, and doing so so quietly that, left to their own devices, no one around them would ever notice anything strange. No one would be bothered, no one would be hurt. Just like Kikyou, and just like Sato. Shuuichi stared down at his glasses and sighed heavily.

Matoba’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you wear those?” he asked suddenly, nodding at Shuuichi’s glasses. “You’re not nearsighted; your file would have said so. They must be useless, for someone like you.”

After a long moment’s pause, Shuuichi said shortly, “It’s not important. Hey, listen, when we’re done with this building, why don’t we get something to eat? We’re probably going to be at this all day, and hunger’s never made it easy for me to pick out androids in a crowd.”

“…Alright.”

-0-0-0-

Shuuichi might not come willingly to District Four very often, but he’d been sent to patrol there often enough to have a few places where he didn’t mind eating lunch (Since he didn’t really like lugging a lunchbox around with him). One of them, a small diner on the ground floor of a shopping mall, happened to be nearby.

They took a booth by the window, the better to be able to look out periodically and see if the ever-shifting sea of faces ever yielded up a familiar one, though the sea of faces was sometimes more a sea of multi-colored umbrellas. There was the same almost-welcoming aroma of food cooking in the kitchen that greeted Shuuichi whenever he visited; the checkered tablecloths had recently been switched out for daffodil-print plastic tablecloths. When asked what to order, Shuuichi asked for takoyaki—he got that often enough, and today, he preferred to eat something familiar. Somewhat to his surprise, Matoba, after watching carefully as he ordered his lunch, asked for the same thing.

“Do you like takoyaki, then?” Shuuichi asked him curiously.

“Ah…” Matoba tilted his head slightly to one side. “Actually, I’ve never had it before.”

Shuuichi stared at him. “Seriously? What do they eat on Mars, then?” Even if they didn’t have takoyaki on Mars, which he supposed was possible, Matoba had been living here for two years; it hardly seemed possible that he’d never come across a food cart selling takoyaki. “Mars rocks?”

“No, not ‘Mars rocks’, whatever _that_ is supposed to be, and not takoyaki, it would seem.” Matoba smirked at him. “But don’t be so smug, Natori-san. I can’t imagine you know very much about Martian food.”

“Martian food?” Shuuichi raised an eyebrow. “Well, it can’t be all that different from Earth food, can it? It’s not like Mars _has_ any native plants. Or animals.”

“Then you shouldn’t have any difficulty telling me what this is.” Matoba whipped out his phone, tapped the screen a few times, and handed it off to Shuuichi. His eyes were gleaming with what Shuuichi thought was entirely too much amusement for this situation.

The image was one of a large ceramic bowl filled with a frothy white liquid. Chunks of what looked like potatoes—or was it cheese?—floated in the liquid, along with small, green _somethings_. Shuuichi shrugged. “Curry?” he tried.

“Wrong,” Seiji… _Matoba_ said in a singsong voice, smirking.

“What is it, then?”

“Figure it out yourself.”

“You are getting way too much enjoyment out of this.” Then, Shuuichi realized something. He grinned. “What, so you just decided to order whatever I ordered, even though you didn’t know if you’d like it or not?”

Matoba’s face gave away nothing as he replied, quite evenly, “Well, Natori-san, if I don’t like it, at least I know who to blame.”

“Oh, sure.” Shuuichi still couldn’t quite keep from grinning. “That makes perfect sense.”

The wait for their food stretched on, from ten minutes, to fifteen, to twenty. Shuuichi watched the people outside walk on by them, many but not all folding their umbrellas away as the rain slowly ground to a halt. There were plenty whose hair colors, whose tattoos, whose piercings could have been useful identifying marks on an android, but none who matched up with those very ordinary faces in the two profiles.

 _If they know what’s good for them, they’re hiding out, laying low. They must know if they go long enough without being captured or drawing attention to themselves, neither their parent corporation nor my people will be able to justify having someone actively looking for them personally. Sure, they’d still have to be careful, but they’d be scot-free for a while, until… That’d be enough time for Takeo to find a ‘skin’ graft, cover up the exposed wiring._ Shuuichi’s hand went to his shirt sleeve, but he stopped himself before he could clutch at the fabric and yank it down.

(He found his gaze straying to the man sitting opposite him. Matoba was reading something on his phone, his hair slipping over his cheeks and his face gone slack and unguarded, thoroughly oblivious to any scrutiny. Shuuichi caught himself staring at him. He quickly wrenched his gaze away, in that case.)

Eventually, even someone who did this for a living had to get tired of scouring the faces in front of him. Shuuichi turned his attention to the menu instead. He got the same meal so often that he rarely paid the menu any mind; he didn’t think he had looked at it more than four times since the first time he had come to eat here. He scanned the list of items, but stopped when he happened on something that surprised him—daifuku with _blueberry_ filling.

“Did you see this?” he muttered to Seiji, turning the menu around so that he could read it properly and pointing out the daifuku.

Seiji looked at the item in question, and said matter-of-factly, “It’s probably artificial. I didn’t see a license to sell fruit anywhere in here—“ he craned his neck looking around the inside of the diner, and found nothing to contradict the assertion “—and it’s not like they have to specify if it’s real or not. What that is, Natori-san, is likely a paste made up very cleverly to _look_ like blueberry filling, but with a different flavor and far too much sugar.”

Shuuichi nodded, disappointed in spite of himself. The food here was decent, but he’d never gotten the impression that this place had enough spare cash to even buy a license to sell fruit, let alone the money required to buy enough fruit to serve it up on the menu for anyone who asked. _It would have been different…_ “Have you ever had fruit before?” he asked Seiji suddenly. “Fresh fruit, I mean. It’s hard enough to get it here; it must be a lot harder to find—or afford—on Mars.”

“Once or twice.” Seiji was scrolling down something on his phone; Shuuichi tilted his head forwards, but he still couldn’t quite see what. “My father bought strawberries when I graduated high school. Otherwise, we ate freeze-dried, and not that often; my mother liked to use raisins as a topping for salads.” He looked up from his phone. “And you?”

“About the same,” Shuuichi admitted. “I remember my mother buying some oranges once when I was small—back when my family actually had some money. Aside from that, it’s been—“

“Excuse me?” A young woman stopped by their table, holding two plates of takoyaki. “I have your meals.”

Shuuichi restrained a grimace, wondering how much of their conversation she had heard. It sure would be awkward if she’d overhead them talking about how likely (or rather, unlikely) it was that one of the items on the menu was even real. But across from him, Seiji just nodded and smiled vaguely. “Thank you.”

The takoyaki was clearly fresh; it was still piping hot, enough to burn the roof of your mouth if you weren’t careful. That it was still warm mattered rather more to Shuuichi on frigid days like these than if it was good or not—it _was_ good today, he allowed. A lot of the time, he couldn’t concentrate on the taste, or couldn’t seem to taste anything at all, though logically he knew that there must be a taste of some kind. But he could taste it just fine today.

Shuuichi watched Seiji closely as he started to eat, but he showed no outward reaction of pleasure, disgust, or even surprise. He just ate as though this was something he ate every day, and was completely commonplace. _Rats. I was kind of hoping he’d… Oh well._

As he ate, Shuuichi chanced another glance out the window. The crowd had thinned out a bit—many of them must have gone inside for lunch—and for the first time, Shuuichi could get a clear look at the shops on the other side of the street. He could see three doors from where he was sitting. One opened up to a chocolate shop another to a children’s clothing store. The third, however, was shut, the windows dark. There was something painted on it, in bright red tones. Shuuichi frowned and tried to read the words. _‘What’s the point of working if we…’_

The moment Shuuichi realized what he was reading, he paled and turned away from the window. If he hadn’t been inside, he might have put his hat back on. As it was, he slouched in his seat.

Seiji must have noticed his disquiet, because he paused from eating to frown at him. “What is it?” When Shuuichi didn’t say anything, Seiji peered out the window to where he had been looking. “’What’s the point of working if we just give all the jobs to the Others?’ If I had to guess, I’d say someone’s not happy about outsourcing to foreign naturals.” He raised an eyebrow at Shuuichi. “It certainly is laughable that someone would deface a perfectly good door over that, but frightening?”

Shuuichi glared at him from over the top of his glasses, still slouched in his seat. “’Other’ is slang for _‘android._ ’”

Any trace of bemusement fled Seiji’s face. “Ah.”

“Do you know anything about this?”

“No, I didn’t. I believe I might have told you that I’ve rarely left Corporation grounds since coming here. It’s not like security’s just going to let a group of protesters through the front gate.”

Even if he _hadn’t_ gone off the grounds of the Matoba Corporation often in the past two years, Shuuichi was more than a little surprised that Seiji knew nothing at all about this. But if he didn’t, he needed to. “They’re not really organized enough to be called protesters,” Shuuichi muttered. He picked at his takoyaki, appetite thoroughly quashed. “I’ve never seen them in groups larger than two or three, and none of them ever quite say the same thing as the others. They come in two ‘types,’ usually. Well, three, but the kind of people who think androids are abominations and need to be destroyed on principle aren’t the kind of people you usually run into on the street. At least, they don’t make their views clear on the street.”

Seiji made a face. “I should hope not.”

“Yeah, they’re _fun_.” Well, less ‘fun’, more ‘loud.’ And vaguely alarming, but that was neither here nor there. “One of the types I run into is the person who thinks androids are taking away jobs from flesh-and-blood citizens. Pretty much the worst they ever do is leave messages on the doors of stores they know are selling goods made by android labor; sometimes they vandalize the stores themselves, but I’ve never heard of them actually hurting anyone.”

“And the other type does?” Seiji prompted, eyes narrowed.

Some cross between a laugh and a groan escaped Shuuichi’s lips. “Sometimes. They’re the androids’ rights supporters. They probably wouldn’t be a problem, except a lot of them carry pepper spray or stronger, and they’ve been known to interfere when they see a bounty hunter going about their work.”

Understanding flashed through Seiji’s eyes. “Hence the glasses that you don’t actually need.”

Shuuichi nodded. “When I was first starting out, the man I was assigned to as a trainee told me to have something covering my eyes when I worked. Glasses won’t catch all of the pepper spray and it won’t help you if it gets sprayed at your nose or your mouth, but glasses aren’t as conspicuous as goggles or full facial masks.” A scowl stole over his face. “I can understand their point of view on some things. If their working conditions were more humane, if they actually got _paid_ for their work and they were allowed to leave their workplace in between shifts, maybe you wouldn’t see so many androids trying to escape.” And maybe it would prevent what tended to happen when an android tried to escape—both to the android in question, and to anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire. After all, if you caged an animal, it got vicious, didn’t it?

(And maybe, he could do his work without a churning stomach or lungs starved for air. But maybe that was beyond him, now.)

Seiji fixed him with a piercing stare, his face unreadable. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You could be out of a job if that happened—the only reason your line of work exists in the first place is because androids have never been granted full personship.”

What hadn’t been said there struck Shuuichi more than what had been, but he didn’t respond to it. Instead, he adjusted his glasses, and remarked, “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. It’d be better than being fired, especially consid… But there’s hardly any point to it, is there?” Shuuichi frowned bitterly. “Androids only live about four years. Five at the most. Then, poof.” He waved his hand. “They shut down. It’s hard to live a full life in four years, isn’t it?” And yet, he still had this job. His frown deepened.

Outside, the rain started up again, scattering the pedestrians who gave short, sharp cries as they dove for the safety of the shops. Seiji watched them duck and cover for a few moments, took a sip of water, and said, “Well, the Mark 8s—when they’re finished, anyways—are supposed to be able to live for ten years.”

Shuuichi blinked. “You’re kidding.” That was a pretty big leap, all things considered; even the Matoba Corporation’s Mark 7s burned out after only four to five years, once the internal wear and tear proved too much to take. Was this why the Mark 8s had been in production for so long? “What, do they pass the Voight-Kampff, too?” he asked, only half-jokingly.

“Why, Natori-san!” Seiji smiled at him, his eyes glinting with mischief. Shuuichi felt his heart skip a beat—or a few. “You know that would be highly illegal, and the last thing the Corporation wants is to spend the next year and a half in litigation.”

 _“Sure_.” Shuuichi rolled his eyes, biting back a laugh as he did so. As if anyone could make anything stick to the Matoba Corporation; even the worst accusations seemed to slide off them like water off duck feathers.

“Our clients want androids that can live longer,” Seiji went on, running his fingernail over the lip of his glass. “It’s just good business.” The smile slowly faded from his lips, and his gaze grew far-away as he stared off into space. “Though I do wonder if empathy if really something so simple that it can be measured with a test, if humans can be caught in the snares, too, and androids can emulate their behavior so well,” he murmured.

Shuuichi looked away, and said nothing.

-0-0-0-

The rain fell off and on as the afternoon wore on, coming in fitful showers that lasted maybe five minutes each, just long enough to disrupt the routines of shoppers and outdoors vendors and panhandlers, leaving them flinching and adjusting their umbrellas (or coats, or blankets), or scooting under the closest bit of cover they could find. When the rain finally abated, the sky showed itself choked with murky gray clouds, with the odd ray of light and patch of pale blue sky peering through.

Shuuichi headed to the bridge over the sluggishly-flowing river that separated District Four from District Five after searching another shopping building and finding nothing. Seiji still followed close behind him, though the intense interest in his surroundings he’d earlier displayed had begun to fade in favor of visible restlessness and equally visible discomfiture with the crowds. It was actually a little disappointing to watch (much to Shuuichi’s surprise), but Shuuichi didn’t really know what to say about it. This was probably going to wind up taking at least a couple of more days, and unless Matoba-san changed his mind about wanting to keep Shuuichi under ‘observation,’ Seiji would be stuck with him until they found the androids or the powers that be called off the search.

_Not nearly as ‘interesting’ as you thought it was, huh? At least you don’t see…_

_Knock it off. Focus on the work._

The bridge stretched half a mile in length and soared to a truly dizzying height over the dark waters of the river (Shuuichi counted himself lucky that he wasn’t afraid of heights). The reek of gasoline gave way to the almost fetid smell of brackish water. Like the streets in District Four, it had originally been built to accommodate cars, six lanes of them, in fact, but had been shut down for some reason or another. Hopefully not structural problems with the bridge, since Shuuichi liked to think that at least most of the people who walked over it had enough of a sense of self-preservation not to walk on a bridge that could collapse at any moment. Only specially-licensed vehicles could drive on it.

There was certainly no shortage of pedestrian traffic on the bridge. It was dotted with vendors’ carts—a woman selling patterned blankets, a man selling plastic jewelry and keychains and other odds and ends, someone selling bottled water, someone selling umbrellas. Couples chatted at the rough stone railings; clusters of people heading for the same place hustled by, hands buried in their pockets, their noses buried in their scarves. A few were huddled sitting by the rails or the massive support beams, watching the passersby hopefully.

“Do you often find androids here?” Seiji muttered, fiddling with his umbrella as though toying with the idea of opening it, before apparently letting the idea go.

“ _I_ never have; other people have found androids here often enough for it to be marked as a place of interest,” Shuuichi explained. “It was worth looking into.”

“I suppose. But do androids really come somewhere so exposed to hide? That seems counter-intuitive.”

Shuuichi grimaced, adjusting the rim of his hat as he did so. “Not to hide, exactly. They, well… Wait…”

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as Shuuichi spotted two men sitting by the railing up ahead. They were huddled close together under a green blanket patterned with yellow roses. Just in front of them was a piece of white plastic siding with _‘Will work for food_ ’ scrawled on it. The two men had brown hair and soft, youthful facial features.

 _Could it be…_ Shuuichi felt his heart start to beat unevenly. “I think I see them,” he said quietly to Seiji, pointing the two men out to him.

Seiji eyed the two men closely for a long moment, before nodding. “I think you do,” he replied, frowning slightly.

 _Well, if I’m wrong, all I have to do is look at their arms to prove it. Takeo won’t have had time to get a ‘skin’ graft—not a good one, anyways_. _If I’m right, well, there’s no explaining that away, is there? No chance of mistaking him for a human being, and no android would have any legitimate business here._

Shuuichi approached the two men, Seiji close on his heels and coming to stand on his right side. Up close, he could see that their faces were indeed identical to Aoi and Takeo, every feature the same. “Get up,” he told them shortly, forcing himself to make eye contact with both of them in turn.

Aoi shifted his weight nervously, letting the blanket fall from his shoulders. His eyes darted back and forth, from Shuuichi, to Seiji, to Takeo beside him. Takeo, on the other hand, glared angrily. “And who are you to be telling me to do anything?” he demanded hotly.

“I—“

Before Shuuichi could get more than one word out of his mouth, let alone tell him to stop, Seiji’s hands shot out. He caught Takeo’s right arm in his grasp before he could lurch away, pulling at his sleeve.

“Hey!” Takeo exclaimed, trying to push him away with his free arm, to no avail. “Let me go!”

Meanwhile, showing no sign of even noticing Takeo’s ire, Seiji managed to push his sleeve all the way up his forearm. And under that sleeve there was a stretch of exposed wiring, gunmetal gray and glinting dully, surrounded by ridges of torn synthskin. “They’re definitely the ones we’re looking for,” he said evenly when he drew away, his eyes gleaming.

Takeo’s look of anger turned to slack-jawed horror. Aoi, however, was a bit quicker than that. He bolted, tearing through the crowds until Shuuichi lost sight of him altogether. Shuuichi stared after him for a moment, lips pressed tightly together, before turning his full attention back to Takeo. There was no question of going after Aoi. He couldn’t leave Seiji alone with Takeo, and couldn’t very well let Seiji go running after Aoi—the whole reason Seiji was shadowing him was because only a bounty hunter could apprehend or eliminate at-large androids.

Takeo sprang to his feet, stumbling away from the two men until he hit the railing. “No…” His hands scrabbled uselessly against the rail. “I don’t want to die!” he exclaimed, his voice cracking. The pedestrians on the bridge started to stare at the unfolding scene, whispering amongst themselves with their eyes wide. The spectators were assembled, and once you were reduced to that, an actor press-ganged into that role by the bystanders, well, there really was no escaping it. “I don’t want to die! Just leave me alone!”

Shuuichi paused, all his lines frozen upon his lips. He stared at Takeo, who stood pressed up against the railing, his feet scuffing the ground as though he could conjure up new ground at his back if he just tried hard enough. His lips were pulled away from his gritted teeth, his eyes bulging. His fear was so palpable in the chill air that Shuuichi could practically _taste_ it. He looked…

Seiji frowned at him for a moment, his eyes slightly narrowed. Then, he turned his attention back to Takeo, and fixed a decidedly brittle smile to his face. “Well, if you put such value on your life, you do have an alternative to dying here. You can go back to work.”

Takeo’s breathing grew loud and hitched, his chest heaving as though he might be sick, impossible as that was. His eyes flitted back and forth between Shuuichi and Seiji. Behind them, the crowd of onlookers had fallen deathly silent.

Then, before anyone could stop him, Takeo turned on his heel and jumped over the side of the bridge.

-0-0-0-

Upon arriving at the scene, it took the recovery team the better part of an hour to fish Takeo’s body out of the river. Androids sink like stones in water; you could program one with all the knowledge of swimming in the world and give it what was outwardly the perfect body for swimming, and it wouldn’t matter, because they’d sink too fast to swim. Once recovered, the water-logged corpse sat out on the bridge for a moment as the photographer took photo after photo of it, head to toe. Takeo’s limbs were bent and broken by the fall, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle. His skull was caved in, synthbone jutting out from torn synthskin and tattered hair, exposing clusters of red, blue, purple and silver wires. One of his eyes had popped out of its socket, dangling by a few fraying wires. He looked much, much smaller than he had when he still lived. When the photographer was done with him, Takeo’s body was loaded into the back of an Agency van and drove off, swallowed up by the crowds and the lengthening shadows.

Of course, they both had to give a statement, answer questions; it was all standard procedure for… for something like this. Shuuichi didn’t remember what he said, precisely. He remembered more the way one of his coworkers had questioned him as he made his statement—perhaps better to say Shuuichi remembered the look in his eye, that mixture of skepticism and sympathy and vaguely contemptuous anyone at the Agency got when an android did… this. Beside him, Seiji stood with his arms folded tightly tight across his chest, speaking only a few abrupt words, but he corroborated everything Shuuichi said. That was all that was required of him. He remembered all too vividly the way the crowd, which would _not_ disperse no matter how times it was told to, stared at the scene, at the empty spot where Takeo had stood, at the plain white van that had pulled over by the scene, at the photographer who catalogued everything that went on there, at him as though he was the most alien and the most dangerous of everyone there.

The crowd wouldn’t go. Shuuichi was sitting at the railing, staring out over the river, but he could still feel their eyes on his back. The play was over; the curtains had fallen. The spectators ought to go home once the lights turned off, Shuuichi thought irritably, but he didn’t turn to them. He didn’t want to see their faces.

A few soft footfalls sounded off to his left. Then, Seiji leaned down and brushed his fingertips against the back of his hand. His fingers were almost startlingly warm, considering the cold. “Your colleagues are done with us,” he said quietly, peering into Shuuichi’s face with what almost looked like worry. “We should go now, while we still have some light. Aoi can wait until we have more information; we’d never find him in the dark.”

Shuuichi nodded choppily. “Yeah, you’re right.” He got to his feet slowly, his legs wobbling like jelly as he did so. A strong gust of wind sent Takeo and Aoi’s blanket flying, drifting in the air like a mottled leaf for a few moments before drifting down to the river. Yellow splotches were visible for maybe a second before vanishing.

He started to walk back towards District Four proper—the crowd parted quickly (too quickly to let him and Seiji pass)—but apparently he wasn’t moving fast enough for Seiji’s liking, because before long Seiji planted a hand between his shoulders and fairly propelled him back down the bridge. “Stop that!” Shuuichi hissed. “I know the way.”

Seiji didn’t look at him as he replied, “And yet you wander around as though lost.”

Shuuichi could make no answer to that.

At length, the bridge touched firm ground again. The street lamps turned on one by one as the sky turned dark, flickering like white candle flames. The crowds had started to thin out in earnest, now—the always did as it started to get dark, as shoppers went to their homes, the hungry to the restaurants and the homeless to the shelters. When they came to a particularly deserted street, Seiji stopped beneath one of the flickering lamps, and Shuuichi turned and looked at him. He didn’t want… He just wanted to go home, but still, he couldn’t help but be curious. “What is it?”

“You, actually.” Seiji was frowning at him again, his head tilted slightly to one side. “This can’t have been the first time you’ve ever seen something like this.”

Shuuichi felt his stomach start to tie itself into knows again—the feeling was familiar enough, but somehow exceptionally painful tonight. “You don’t understand,” he ground out. “It’s…” He trailed off, staring into Seiji’s face, wondering what on earth he could possibly say.

“If you don’t like the work, then quit. You _can_ do that.”

“No, actually, I can’t,” Shuuichi muttered, hunching his shoulders. “I’m under contract; I signed twenty years of my life away to the Agency.”

Seiji’s frown sharpened. “Does everyone who works for them have to sign such a contract?”

“Yeah.” And he’d read it all the way through, and had known exactly what the job would entail, and still, somehow everything about it had managed to throw him. “They didn’t always, but I asked around and found out that in the beginning the Agency couldn’t keep people on for more than a few months before they quit, so they made up the contracts so, well, you couldn’t.” Something Shuuichi still wished he’d known about before he signed his own contract. “If I quit before my term is up, I get no pension, no reference, and a big, black mark on my résumé. I don’t have any other skills—not ones that’d guarantee me a job, anyways. Do you really think I want to end up on the streets? Sure, I’d never be _starved_ for company, but that’s the whole problem—if you fall out of the sight of the world here, you’ll never get back up again.” Shuuichi scrubbed at his forehead. “And even if that wasn’t the case, there aren’t a whole lot of people willing to hire a former bounty hunter. It’s not worth the stigma.”

“And your family wouldn’t support you if you fell on hard times?” Seiji asked, sounding almost confused. Then again, he seemed to get on well with his grandfather.

Shuuichi laughed bitterly. “My family and I don’t talk anymore.”

He all but collapsed onto a nearby bench, its wrought-iron back so piercingly cold that it felt like being sliced open by a knife, just a little bit. He felt like his bones had been replaced with lead; later, though, he’d fight sleep for as long as he could, as hard as he could, knowing all too well what was waiting for him behind the veil of sleep. _Don’t feel any…_ He couldn’t even finish the thought.

“If all you’ve said is true…” When Shuuichi looked up, Seiji had sat down beside him, was staring at him with an inquisitive frown on his face. “…Why did you even get involved in this line of work? Everyone knows that a bounty hunter’s work is dangerous, with little reward,” he pointed out, sounding so reasonable, but Shuuichi could still find it in him to smart at being told that. “And frankly—“ Seiji’s voice sharpened, but oddly, Shuuichi couldn’t make out a single note of accusation in it “—you seem more sympathetic to androids than is advisable for someone whose entire job is to capture and kill them.”

“I… you don’t understand.”

“Then tell me.”

Shuuichi laughed again, a short, choking sound. “Are you really so eager to know? Or am I going to get dropped like a hot stone the moment you get home?”

“Maybe,” Seiji allowed, smirking sharply. “But that’s the risk you take whenever you talk to anyone about anything, isn’t it? Anything you say can be used to hurt you, or be twisted into something that can hurt you. In this case…” He paused and flicked a bit of dirt off his jeans. “…I can reasonably assure you that my grandfather cares for nothing but your results—your qualms won’t matter so long as you don’t let them overwhelm you.”

Which roughly translated to: ‘I won’t say anything to anyone else if I don’t think you pose a threat to the company.’ It was about as much assurance as Shuuichi ever got from anyone. It was about as much assurance as he ever _gave_ anyone.

“It’s… I… didn’t grow up around here. You hear plenty about androids in the cities, but not out in the country. You don’t get reports or news articles; you don’t even get rumors, most of the time. What you get instead is what…” Shuuichi paused, staring straight ahead, refusing to make eye contact with Seiji. It had been much easier, he thought, when they talked about things that didn’t matter. “What you get is what the Agency and all the manufacturers want you to hear, and to believe.”

It felt like such a long time ago. The town Shuuichi had grown up in was small and remote; the only link that town had to androids were the few businesses that were big enough to sell android-produced goods. Visiting his mother’s family in Sapporo was the only occasion Shuuichi ever had to go somewhere androids might be about, but Shuuichi had never paid much attention to news reports when he was with his mother’s family, and his grandparents didn’t like to talk about it at all.

They used to get fliers in school, little slips of plastic that preached the evils of escaped androids. Androids free of their corporate masters were dangerous to everyone around them; they would kill anyone who risked exposing or capturing them without a scrap of remorse, because they had no capacity to truly understand the suffering they caused others. Natori Shuuichi, young, wanting to find some way to help others, and thoroughly unenamored of the life he was leading in that small town, practically jumped to sign up for basic training once he was old enough.

_Or maybe I didn’t want to help anyone. I don’t even like most people all that much, so maybe I didn’t want to help anyone at all. Maybe I just wanted adventure. An impure motive begets sad results._

“…I thought that maybe this would let me do some good. But then I actually _became_ a bounty hunter, and the androids I hunted all seemed so…” Shuuichi stopped himself before he could finish that sentence. But all the same, he felt his breath catch in his throat. He turned to Seiji and said, the words coming out too fast, stumbling over each other: “And today, you saw what happened today!” This time, it was Seiji who looked away from him, pressing his lips together in an unhappy line. “That android may have valued his own life enough to take a chance on escaping, but he _still_ chose death over going back to work. And you’re right, that’s _not_ the first time something like that’s happened. So is this _right_?” His voice rose. “Is it?!”

For a long time, Seiji said nothing. A group of giggling teenagers staggered by, their faces showing themselves flushed in the lamplight. The bright pink neon sign of the flower shop opposite them blinked on and off, on and off. Shuuichi stared at him, at his furrowed brow, at his incredibly straight back, at his pensive eyes, at the way his face almost looked… pinched. He sat there waiting, wondering what he would say.

Then, slowly, almost laboriously, Seiji rearranged his face into what was almost a perfect match for the neutral mask he wore most times—mouth pushed into a smooth line, no lines etched into his forehead, and he met Shuuichi’s gaze without any apparent difficulty, but there was no smirk on his lips, no vague, polite half-smile. “I have noticed that people looking to do good deeds are liable to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.”

Shuuichi glared at him.

 _That_ got Seiji to smile, odd and twitching a smile as it might have been. “It’s not something you should discount. Everyone wants something, and many consider using others the best way to get it. With an attitude like yours, you make yourself an easy mark.”

“Is that how it is for you?” Shuuichi fired back. He couldn’t even muster anger; he just felt tired.

Seiji frowned at him. “S—“ He stopped himself, his frown deepening. “Natori-san—“

“You can call me ‘Shuuichi,’” Shuuichi said quietly. “I’m not going to stop you.”

Seiji’s lips twisted upwards in a surprisingly soft smile, albeit one that vanished almost as soon as it had appeared. “Do the same for me, then. Shuuichi-san… You know that escaped androids do often turn violent—“

“Now, _look_ , don’t tell me what escaped androids do, I _know_ what they—“

Seiji reached out and gripped the back of Shuuichi’s hand tightly in his own, effectively cutting off any protests. “You know that escaped androids easily turn violent, either on their keepers as they make their escape, or on those who discover what they really are, later. Or not even on those who know—those who suspect, those who might know. Someone has to stop them.”

But Seiji never answered Shuuichi’s question. Shuuichi supposed he probably couldn’t. It had been useless to suppose he could, useless maybe even to ask. Why would people like them answer that question honestly, or even answer that question at all? Shuuichi stared down at Seiji’s hand, still covering his, warm and washed-out white in the lamplight. That hand gave his a gentle squeeze, and Shuuichi felt… He didn’t know what he felt. A little less tired, maybe.

-0-0-0-

One gray, quiet week later, Shuuichi got a phone call from Seiji just after he got home from work.

“How are you?” Seiji asked, in a rather softer voice than Shuuichi expected—his demeanor the last time they had spoken over the phone had been so business-like that Shuuichi had just expected more of the same.

“I’m fine,” Shuuichi said automatically; the last time he checked, no one who asked that question ever really wanted to know if someone _wasn’t_ fine. He learned up against the open doorway to his bedroom. “Things have been… normal. And you?”

“Much the same. Are you _sure_ you’re alright?” Seiji pressed, a decidedly insistent not entering into his voice.

Shuuichi frowned and hunched his shoulders. “Yeah, I’m sure, Seiji.” He paused, his frown deepening when he realized that something very much like ‘ _Thank you_ ’ was hovering on his lips. “…So why are you calling?”

“Ah. As it happens, I have an update on Aoi.”

“And I’m still on the case?” Shuuichi could hardly keep the skepticism out of his voice.

“Yes, you are. Is there any reason why would wouldn’t be?” Seiji asked quietly.

Shuuichi paused, his response caught at the back of his throat. Then he said, evenly, “No, none.”

“Good. I’ll be at your apartment with the updated information in about an hour—I assume you want this done as soon as possible?”

Shuuichi nodded distractedly. “Yes, I do. I’ll see you then.” But the seed of something else was germinating in the back of his mind.

A little over an hour later, Shuuichi heard a crisp knock at his door. He pushed it open and asked, before Seiji could say anything, “Do you want to go get something to eat?”

 

-0-0-0-

The next morning dawned uncharacteristically clear, watery golden light filtering in through the frosted windows giving everything a soft, fuzzy glow. All was quiet upstairs and in the apartments adjacent to Shuuichi’s. Maybe the kids had the day off, and their parents too. He knew it wouldn’t last for long. Clouds would come drifting over the horizon and obscure the sun; the people around him would wake up and start making a racket. But it was nice while it lasted.

Shuuichi and Seiji sat down on the former’s couch, a sagging, leather thing he’d bought from a junk store once he’d had enough spare cash to do so and had never found the time or care to replace since then. “So you said you had more information on Aoi?” Shuuichi asked, still blinking sleep out of his eyes.

“Yes, I…” Seiji trailed off, his gaze tilting downwards. Then, he curled his hand around Shuuichi’s right wrist. “I haven’t seen this before,” he murmured, with the sort of mellowed dreaminess characteristic of someone who wasn’t yet fully awake. He ran his thumb absently over a small, dark brown, nearly black mark that sat directly atop the pulse point on Shuuichi’s wrist. “An odd place for a tattoo, don’t you think?”

Shuuichi leaned closer to him, so that he almost pressed the side of his head against Seiji’s, but he stopped short, just. He almost smiled when he felt Seiji’s soft black hair brush against his cheek. “You don’t know that much about tattoos, then. And it’s not a tattoo. It’s a birthmark.”

Seiji’s lips curled in an almost incredulous smile. “A birthmark shaped like a lizard? That _is_ odd.”

“It’s not anything strange,” Shuuichi protested, but his voice sounded faint even to his own ears.

He used to pick at it when he was small, wouldn’t stop no matter how his parents told him to—his mother had eventually put a bandage around his wrist, secured with a clasp that only she could open, until he finally agreed to leave it alone. A little dark splotch on his wrist, which looked like a body with four little legs, a triangular head, and a tail that stuck out straight from the body. As a small child, Shuuichi had thought there was something alive trapped under his skin, so it only made sense to try to free it. As he got just a little older…

_“What an interesting mark you have!” The woman’s high voice warbled up and down like an old music tape that had warped and bent from overuse. Her hands over Shuuichi’s small arms were warm and gentle, though, and when her pale, cracked lips parted in a smile, he was overwhelmed by the urge to smile back. “And tell me, do you know why it’s interesting?”_

_“Why?”_

_She tilted her head up so that Shuuichi was looking down into her face, her smile morphing to a grin. There was something glinting just under her bright red curls. Something silver… “Because we all have our marks. But of everyone in the world, you are the only one with a mark like this.”_

It had all been such a long time ago. But sometimes, it was all too close. (Maybe the seeds of curiosity had been planted early on. Maybe the seeds of something else, too.)

“Of course not,” Seiji agreed, but there was a flash of something mischievous in his eyes. “It doesn’t seem like anything strange, not until you start _insisting_ that it isn’t. Then it looks _much_ stranger than it used to.”

“Alright.” He laughed ruefully. “I get it.”

The silence, no thumps on the walls or the ceiling, no shouts in the hall, no words passed between them, had an almost palpable warmth. Shuuichi would have been quite content not to stir for the rest of the morning, but unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. Rather regretfully (and more than a little embarrassed with himself for being taken in enough by the moment to relax), he pulled away and straightened. Seiji followed suit, letting go of Shuuichi’s wrist slowly. His wrist felt colder without that extra source of warmth; he could almost perfectly pinpoint where Seiji’s fingers had been. “Let’s get to work.”

“Yes, let’s. But first, I don’t suppose you have anything to eat around here?”

-0-0-0-

They found Aoi a few hours later, in an alley in District Eight, still panhandling, watching pedestrians walk by and occasionally asking for money or food. He sat small and hunched up by the wall, a look of misery etched onto his face even before he realized who was watching him. Shuuichi thought that if he had any sense, he would have left the city altogether instead of just fleeing to another district. True, it was highly unlikely that Aoi would have even been able to secure transportation out of the city—if he was panhandling like this, he probably didn’t have that much money—but in his place, Shuuichi would have gotten out of the city and as far from it as possible even if he’d had to walk the whole way. _So why stay here_?

Aoi hopped to his feet when he saw Shuuichi and Seiji watching him, his eyes huge with panic. But instead of bolting or trying to attack, he held his hands up in the air and blurted out, “Don’t kill me! I’ll go back to work; just don’t kill me!”

Seiji paused for a moment, clearly thrown by this turn, even if the only way he showed it was by staring silently at Aoi, his mouth slightly open. Then, he nodded and took his phone from his pocket. “That can be arranged,” he said matter-of-factly.

Shuuichi just leaned against the clammy brick wall, breathing a sigh of relief.


	4. Chapter Four

The rain was coming down so hard that, from sound alone, it might well have been taken for hail. High above, the residents on the highest floor of the apartment building may well have been near-deafened by the pounding rain on the roof. To Shuuichi, however, it was little more than a muffled pattering and splattering against the dark windows. He wasn’t really listening to the rain, anyways.

“So, are you glad winter’s finally over?”

The reply that came over the phone was so snippy that Shuuichi had to restrain a laugh when he heard it. “ _Almost_ over, Shuuichi-san, not quite. I wouldn’t call any weather where I still have to wear a winter coat ‘spring.’ It’s still too cold for my tastes.”

Shuuichi rolled his eyes, but he was smiling as he remarked, “Touchy, aren’t we?”

A soft laugh followed this, and Seiji replied, “I must have picked it up from you. You certainly have enough to go around.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“The universe’s, I suppose, since I get no indication that you’re any less touchy when you’re not around me.” Seiji’s voice dropped to a lower, quieter tone. “How are you?”

Shuuichi pressed his back against the cool, faux-leather couch cushion. He grimaced and tried to find a more comfortable position to sit in, but just couldn’t seem to. Finally, he gave up and said, “Fine, fine.” He paused, frowning. The windowpanes rattled as an airplane flew by overhead. “The last android I came across took a potshot at me.”

He didn’t know why he’d said it—honestly, the moment the words left Shuuichi’s mouth, he rather wished he hadn’t said it at all. By unspoken agreement, since that last assignment, he and Seiji had been quite content not to talk about Shuuichi’s work when they spoke to one another, either in person or over the phone. It wasn’t something Shuuichi wanted to address (always getting pushed to the back of his mind with the placating phrase “Maybe next time”, only when ‘next time’ came, it was the same thing all over again), and judging from his silence on the subject, it seemed as though Seiji didn’t want to address it, either. Instead, they talked about literally anything else, or just didn’t talk.

“Are you alright?” Any trace of mirth had fled Seiji’s now-sharp voice.

“Yeah, I’m _fine,_ Seiji,” Shuuichi said quickly. “Give me some credit; I do know how to do my job.”

There came a long, pregnant pause. Shuuichi fidgeted on the couch. _Just drop it._ At length, Shuuichi got a response, in that by-now familiar mocking tone, “You never do seem to know how to respond to concern, do you?”

“Oh, you were concerned?” Shuuichi fired back, inwardly relieved—if Seiji had switched to mocking, that was a good sign, wasn’t it? “I’m touched.”

“Of course you are. I can practically _feel_ your gratitude emanating through the phone.” Some strain of wry amusement had come back into Seiji’s voice, a bit softer than mockery. “Albeit with some difficulty. I suppose I’ll have to settle for hearing it, though, since I can’t see you. …I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages.”

Shuuichi sighed. “It’s been a while, yeah. You know, if you really want to see me more often outside of work, I could always come over there.”

“No, I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Seiji replied, so firmly that Shuuichi’s eyebrows shot up in response. “You’d die of boredom long before I got out of whatever meeting I was attending at the time. There isn’t anything here but a grocery store and a gas station. And a hospital, if you feel like faking illness for your own amusement. The only thing there is to do is walk around, and there isn’t anything to _see_.”

Shuuichi frowned. The Corporation grounds, apart from its corporate offices, the manufacturing plant and housing buildings, had seemed rather bare to him when he was there, but was that really all there was? “What about your apartment? Don’t you have anything there you use to pass the time?”

“……Not much. Honestly, nothing at all that you’d be interested in. And before you ask, I’m not free this weekend either.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that. It sounds like you hardly ever get the weekend off.”

“Well, this is a very busy time for the Matoba Corporation,” Seiji pointed out, and Shuuichi smirked at the almost lecturing tone he heard in his voice. “We’re all busy; I’m hardly the only person working on the weekends. Frankly, I’d be more surprised if I _wasn’t_ asked to work on the weekends.”

“Sure, Seiji. But all I’m hearing in this is that you work five days a week, six or seven a lot of times, and when you get off work all you do is go home and get on the Internet or call me. _Now_ who’s a shut-in?”

“You actually remember that?” Far from sounding annoyed, Seiji sounded a bit amused that Shuuichi remembered that old accusation.

“Remember it? How could I forget it? It was obviously completely wrong. Now _you_ , on the other hand, are starting to sound a lot more like a shut-in than I do.”

“Hmm.” Seiji did not exactly sound convinced. “Well, far be it from me to accuse you of being a poor judge of character.” He asked, more quietly, “Is it raining where you are, too?”

Shuuichi listened for the sound of rain against the window, and, more distantly, on the roof. He nodded, though he knew Seiji couldn’t see him do so. “It is. Why?”

“I just wanted to know. …The weather is so variable here, you know.”

Shuuichi laughed softly. “I do.”

-0-0-0-

“You know, I see plenty of this city during my work hours. Too much, really. Why are you dragging me along with you?”

“You could have just stayed at home, in that case. I don’t remember you complaining when I asked you to come with me.”

“Well, it just didn’t occur to me at the time.”

A laugh hit the still slightly frosty air. “Oh, really?”

“Yes, really.”

All over the city, there was a crisscrossing network of covered bridges over the roads, not dissimilar to the catwalks in the shopping buildings in District Four. Some started at ground level, while others bridged two skyscrapers, hovering in the air at a dizzying height from the ground. Even when all was quiet on the ground, the wind howled over the tops of the bridges and battered on the windows. The crying of the wind, even at its worst, didn’t really faze Seiji. Growing up on Mars had left him well-used to high winds; Hellas Planitia was nothing but hundreds of miles of flat earth with no hills, no trees, just remotely-placed clusters of buildings and the occasional glacier to cut off the wind’s progress.

Shuuichi might have been a bit bothered by the wind, though, because halfway across this particular bridge, he’d stopped and clamped his hands down on the railing until his knuckles bled white. Seiji was a little surprised—he’d gotten no indication earlier that Shuuichi was afraid of heights (so it would have to be the wind, wouldn’t it?)—but he stopped beside him, casting a quizzical look at Shuuichi’s face. “Are you tired already?”

Shuuichi shook his head. “Just give me a minute, Seiji.” A particularly strong gust of wind made the bridge tremble just a bit, and he let out a whistling breath through gritted teeth. “It feels like this whole thing’s gonna come crashing down any minute,” he muttered. “I bet no one’s reinforced it since it was built.”

“Would you feel better if I held you hand?” Seiji offered, only half-jokingly. Shuuichi stared at him and he snickered. “It’s just an idea. Well, if you want to wait a while to catch your breath, why not talk? You’ve been very quiet most of the time we’ve been out here.”

At this, Shuuichi cast a very brief look at Seiji’s face before just as quickly turning his gaze at the busy road, packed full of cars and the screeching of car horns and squealing tires as it was. The sky was a significantly more attractive sight—the sun was setting, and the soft, white clouds were gilt gold and pink. The light caught on Shuuichi’s hair and his skin soft golden, almost to glow. Even the reflection in the glass of the alternating row of sunflowers and red tulips painted on the concrete wall behind them was a much nicer thing to look at than the streets, but Shuuichi didn’t even seem to notice it was there. Seiji never really understood why Shuuichi’s eye seemed to be drawn by the least attractive thing it could find, but that just seemed to be the way it was with him.

“I haven’t got anything interesting.”

“I don’t mind, even if it’s not interesting.”

“Well, there’s…” Shuuichi started to say something, but he cut himself off, grimacing and shaking his head. “No.”

Well, this could only pique Seiji’s curiosity. “What is it?”

“Forget it, Seiji.” Shuuichi reached up and adjusted the brim of his hat. Seiji eyed it with some distaste. He would gladly have stolen and hidden the ridiculous thing a long time ago if Shuuichi didn’t insist as much as he did that it was necessary for obscuring his face when he was out and about.

Seiji quirked an eyebrow. “Is this something I could find out if I looked you up on ‘Skeletons in the Closet?’?” Honestly, he didn’t get the impression that Shuuichi had before starting work as a bounty hunter been given to the sort of stunts that would land someone on the likes of ‘Skeletons in the Closet’ or ‘Things They’ll Regret in Twenty Years’ or other search engines dedicated to serving up so, _so_ many youthful indiscretions on the part of the planetary population. Throwing out an exaggerated suggestion like that did tend to have better results, though.

However, to Seiji’s great surprise, the suggestion actually seemed to strike true. Shuuichi grimaced again, a look of chagrin stealing over his face, and he muttered, “Okay, I am _not_ letting you find out about this over the Internet.” He turned to look at Seiji, clearly fighting down embarrassment as he did so. “If you really want to know, I was on my own during training, and I had to find a job to pay my way, support myself, all of that. I, uhh, I found this job acting in car… commercials.”

“ _You?”_

“Yes, _me_.” Shuuichi frowned. “You don’t believe me?”

“Well…” Seiji smiled a sharp smile, full of teeth. “You see, Shuuichi-san, the thing about acting, even for commercials, is that it requires some degree of charisma. I’d be lying if I said that I had ever found you particularly charismatic, so…”

Shuuichi rolled his eyes, a challenging smirk appearing on his face. “Okay, fine, you don’t believe me? I’ve got this smile I developed while I was doing the commercials. You want to see it?”

“I fail to see how a _smile_ could…”

Shuuichi chose that moment to break out the aforementioned smile, and Seiji trailed off. And stared.

Unless he was very much mistaken, Shuuichi was… sparkling. Literally sparkling. How on earth he was literally sparkling, Seiji had no idea, but for once, he was not particularly curious. “Alright,” he said flatly. “I believe you. Just don’t _do_ that anymore.”

“Is it really that bad?” Shuuichi protested. He was still grinning a bit, but without that… _sparkle_ present, it was significantly more acceptable to the eye.

“ _Yes_. I think your colleagues might take _you_ for an android if you ever smiled at them like that; you looked like an automaton.”

The residual grin faded from Shuuichi’s lips, replaced with a more subdued expression. “It’s a bit embarrassing to think about now, but I liked it fine, back then. It was fun—believe it or not,” he added sharply.

“Why didn’t you stay with it, then?” Seiji asked, finding curiosity back home again. “Couldn’t you make it fit in with your work schedule, somehow?” Admittedly, the mental image of Shuuichi as an actor was an incongruous one, but, knowing him as he did, the image of Shuuichi as a bounty hunter was hardly less incongruous, and yet, there they both were.

Shuuichi’s face twisted in a decidedly bitter cast. “No, that’s not it. When the people who hired me to do the commercials found out what I was using the money for, they freaked and got rid of me as quick as they could.” He smiled, but hollowly. “It’s pretty typical, honestly. I had enough money saved up by then, anyways, so really, the joke’s on them.”

Seiji didn’t reply. It seemed that Shuuichi hadn’t been exaggerating when he said that there was a stigma against hiring anyone associated with the Agency—though it appeared that the stigma stretched further than he had earlier let on, to prospective bounty hunters as well as former ones. That… It made no sense to Seiji, honestly. If someone had the qualifications to do a job, what did their past profession matter? Or their future one? If the issue was an employer trying to safeguard their reputation, discriminating based on what a potential hire—or an existing hire—was planning on doing in the future still made no sense. The offending employee would be gone by the time they started on that oh-so-objectionable career.

(Sounds and images sprang to the forefront of Seiji’s mind. A short, agonized scream; a mangled, waterlogged corpse. He paused mid-train of thought, frowning. Maybe… Perhaps they didn’t want to be associated with those who inflicted pain. With those who looked and sounded most human at the moments of their deaths.)

“Well,” Seiji said briskly, pushing all those thoughts out of his mind (Or trying to, and failing; in the back they stayed, in the shadows but not gone). “Since you said all of that, I can talk some.”

Shuuichi raised an eyebrow, clearly oblivious to what had been going on in his companion’s mind a moment earlier. “Oh?”

“Yes. If nothing else, this seems the perfect time to give the lie to an old accusation of yours.”

“And what is _that_ supposed to be?”

“That I’ve never been around real plants before.”

“Now when did I say that?”

“You’ve never had to. It’s written all over your face.”

A twitching mouth was the only break from Shuuichi’s expressionless look. “Seiji, I’ll believe you’ve been around real plants when I see the negatives. Actually, scratch that—good fakes look real in photos. I’ll believe you’ve been around real plants when I see you around them myself.”

“You think I’m lying?” Seiji asked, mock-hurt. “I’m _wounded_ , Shuuichi-san, I really am.”

Shuuichi smiled quickly, in a brief flash of teeth. “Well it’s just so hard to believe. You’re so fond of these fake flowers of yours. And you’ve always said Mars is a barren rock.”

“That shows how little you know. There is a botanical garden on Mars—only the one, but it’s large enough to make up for that. It’s in Anduri, the planetary capital. That’s in Syria Planum—far enough from where my family lived that I only went there once.

“My mother was attending some sort of workshop—I don’t remember what for; I was quite young at the time—and since it was summer vacation, my father took time off of work and we all went together. One day, while my mother was at her workshop, my father and I went to the botanical gardens.” Seiji smiled slightly in reminiscence. “There were hundreds of different plant species there—trees, flowers, vines, ferns, succulents, cacti, grasses, bushes; if you can name it, it was probably there. Someone tried to introduce actual insects to this sort of environment, but they had never thrived, so instead the garden staff was utilizing mechanical bees and butterflies to pollinate the flowers. Wonderful distraction for small children. I had never seen so many different kinds of plants before; the only other time I saw real plants was when my school took classes on field trips to the agricultural greenhouses. It was…”

The blast of humid air that had hit him when he walked through the doors, that was still vivid—that was a memory Seiji could call up with ease. So too was the vibrant array of colors before him, green and golden and scarlet and all the rest. The mechanical butterflies’ wings had been painted to mimic the patterns of actual butterfly species, both extant and extinct—that was easy enough to remember, jewel-bright wings flashing blue and yellow and orange in the light. But for the life of him, Seiji couldn’t remember what any of the plants had smelled like, not the green leaves, not the bright flowers, not the fragrant bushes. He couldn’t remember what the plants that he’d been allowed to touch had felt like under his hands, not if they were velvet-soft or unbearably thorny—sometimes it was almost more like he remembered photos, flat things with no depth, until the memories puffed out again and everything became tangible.

He did remember becoming nervous when he saw how many bees there were, and that his father had laughed before explaining that they wouldn’t hurt him, but he couldn’t remember what his father’s laugh had sounded like. Seiji pressed his mouth into a thin, tight line. No matter how he strained, he couldn’t remember what either of his parents’ voices had sounded like. He tried not to think too hard about that, most of the time.

“Seiji?” Seiji was drawn from his reverie by the sudden rough weight of Shuuichi pressing his hand on his shoulder. Shuuichi was looking at him with some concern, his brow drawn up. “Are you alright?”

Seiji nodded, drawing a short, soft sigh. “I’m fine. Just… remembering.” He wondered, briefly, if his parents had ever stood on this bridge; this had been where they lived before relocating to Mars, after all. He caught himself wondering, at odd moments, if the street he was walking down was one they had walked. It would have been nice to know.

When Seiji felt Shuuichi curl his hand around his, fingers wound together, Seiji squeezed back tightly, until he could feel Shuuichi’s pulse under his fingertips.

It had been such a long time ago.

-0-0-0-

“You’ve been going out into the city more often than you used to,” Tatsuya commented one day as Seiji was putting a few files away in his office. He was smiling gently at him from his chair, his hands pressed tight against the silver handle of his cane.

Seiji paused for a moment before nodding. “Yes, I am. I’ve found it and its people to be quite… interesting.”

“I’m glad. I was beginning to wonder if you would ever take more than a passing interest in the people here.” Tatsuya’s eyes glinted. “You should be careful, though. One can come to harm so easily there, and fall from the sight of the world. I would hate it if something were to happen to you.”

Seiji laughed. “I’ll be careful, Grandfather, don’t worry. But really, how dangerous can they be?”

Tatsuya chuckled under his breath. “Oh, for the fearlessness of youth. You’ll find out one day, Seiji; hopefully later rather than sooner.”

“Hmm.” As Seiji was leaving the office, he paused at the doorway and peered back inside. “Grandfather? I’ve been curious about something, for a while now.”

“Oh? And what is that?”

“…How long does it normally take someone to forget someone else’s voice? …Someone close to you?”

Tatsuya sighed and waved his hand languidly in the air. “It is surprisingly easy, actually. When your grandmother was still alive, there were days when she would wish me a good day at work, and I couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like by the time I got there.” He turned a piercing eye on Seiji. “Why do you ask?”

Seiji smiled thinly. “No reason.”

-0-0-0-

When next Shuuichi got a phone call from Seiji, it wasn’t after work, as was usually the case, but at about two in the afternoon, while he was out patrolling a strip of District Six packed with gray-faced, shifty-eyed pedestrians. _What’s this about?_ he mused, staring down at his vibrating phone. _He knows not to make any personal calls during my work hours—come to mention it, there are Seiji’s work hours too._ Shuuichi bit back a sigh. _So this probably has to do with work._

He pressed ‘receive’ and put the phone up to his ear. “Hello?”

“Shuuichi-san.” On the other end of the line, Seiji sounded tense, his voice taut and flat. “…I have some news.”

“I figured. Another android’s gotten loose?”

“Yes, from our manufacturing plant on the grounds, earlier today.”

Shuuichi supposed it probably wasn’t the time to point out that, for all that Seiji expressed confidence in the Corporation’s security staff, they did seem to be losing androids with greater frequency than most manufacturers. _It’s usually only the buyers who have this much trouble holding on to androids. What’s going on over there?_ “Just one?”

“As far as can be determined, yes. We’re still trying to figure out exactly what happened, but one of the security guards at the entrance is dead, and another injured.” Seiji’s voice grew, if possible, even tauter, like razor wire stretched over fence posts. Shuuichi, on the other hand, felt as though his blood has been replaced with ice. “The dead guard’s service weapon is missing; it’s not clear if she took it with her or not, but at this point we’re—“

“Seiji, if your runner’s armed and she’s _killed_ someone, you can’t wait to get a file put together to let the Agency know,” Shuuichi interjected, running the details over and over in his mind, her blood going colder all the time. Gun laws were strict, here—only police officers were permitted to carry guns in the cities, and not even all of them. Oh, sure, people carried pepper spray and knives and things like that, but the vast majority of people here had never even heard gunfire, let alone seen a gun in use. Even Shuuichi, who’d grown up in the countryside, had only heard gunfire from hunters’ rifles a handful of times in his life, and never up close. “They need to know now, so they can—“

“That has already been taken care of.” Irritation bled into Seiji’s voice. “Please, do _not_ quote my duties back to me as though I don’t know what they are. We both know better than to play that game.”

Shuuichi swallowed down on a retort—he could hear the strain of anxiety behind irritation, the tense assessment of details, of threats already carried out and those still yet to come. Still… “This is dangerous.”

“I know. It will take some time to put a file together. If someone else finds her in the meantime, that’s just how it’s going to have to be.”

Shuuichi found the clammy wall of an office building at his back and leaned up against it, sighing heavily. “So, if you haven’t got a file ready yet, why tell me now? It’s not like I can really _do_ anything about this right now.” Except fret, and start at the crack of a car engine backfiring or any other loud sound that could be taken for gunfire in a moment of panic.

For a moment, his only answer was silence. Shuuichi could hear something whirring loudly in the background—a fan, maybe—and that was the only sound he got. “Seiji?”

“…As to that…” There was an odd timbre to Seiji’s voice, one Shuuichi didn’t recognize. “I thought it better to tell you ahead of time, so you would have sufficient time to… prepare.”

In other words, there would be no offer of returning to the Matoba Corporation for this android, not after she’d killed someone escaping them. _No reprieve for her, and I’m to be her executioner._ He opened his mouth, a defensive retort coming up out of habit, but it died on his lips. When he thought about it, it was honestly… a relief, that someone knew. “Thank you,” he said tiredly. “I’ll keep an eye out until you’ve got the file ready.”

“Do that. I’ll speak to you later.”

Once Seiji had hung up, Shuuichi pinched the bridge of his nose, shutting his eyes against the glare of sunlight on gray clouds. He had a _really_ bad feeling about this.

-0-0-0-

“That’s the store?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. There’s a public parking garage just down the street; I’m gonna pull in there.”

The file said that the android, a female Mark 7, had taken a job in a department store, under the name ‘Tachibana Akina.’ The photos revealed a woman with a thin, sharp face, long, straight hair with short bangs, pale, pinkish lips, and eyes that even in a photograph looked entirely too keen and discerning for comfort. Akina looked completely identical to a human, even to Shuuichi’s trained eyes, except in two regards, in that her eyes were an unnaturally pale shade of gray and her hair white as bleached bone, and even that could be put down to albinism or some other condition.

 _Amazing what passes for ‘identifying marks’ these days. They could have at least made her hair blue or something like that._ Shuuichi frowned as he remembered what he had thought at the very first sight of her face, what had been hovering in his mind since then. _She looks so human_. They kept looking more human, the higher their Mark. And androids could kill as well as humans could. Sometimes better.

The revolving glass doors of the department store had been polished to a high gleam, panels sparkling, brass frames glinting. Shuuichi’s heart began to pound as he stepped through them. The first floor opened up on myriad racks of crisp clothing and shelves filled with neat, glossy shoeboxes; shoppers milled about, sorting through the clothes with mild interest, while store employees dashed to and fro. He scanned his surroundings intently, looking for any sign of Akina in amongst the shoppers and employees; he could easily imagine that Seiji, following just a step behind, was doing the same.

If Akina was smart, she had likely dumped the gun a long time ago, or at the very least had _not_ brought it to her workplace. It wasn’t likely that Akina would recognize Shuuichi as a bounty hunter, and even less likely that she’d stage an ambush, but androids _did_ sometimes attack on being outed, and Akina has already deemed freedom worth killing for once. Shuuichi pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, his jaw set.

As they combed the ground floor, they passed by a table laden down with green glass vases full of cloth hyacinths. “Try not to get distracted by all the pretty flowers,” Shuuichi muttered to Seiji, forcing a smirk. A paltry attempt at a joke, to be sure, and he felt no lighter for it.

“I assure you I can control myself.” Seiji made an equally paltry attempt at a smile that soon faded to a more serious expression, as he went back looking about the floor for their target.

Shuuichi let his gaze linger on him a moment longer. He wished, briefly, that Seiji wasn’t here. Not today. But there was no use in wishing for that, and it did them both a disservice to countenance it. He put it away.

“Do you see any sign of a manager’s office?” Shuuichi muttered after a while longer scanning the ground floor. As much as he would have liked to confirm Akina’s location before tipping off someone in charge or avoid doing anything that might tip off Akina instead, he was realizing that it was going to be a lot simpler just to figure out from a supervisor where she was and head from there.

“The offices are probably on the top floor, if anywhere,” Seiji replied. He craned his neck, peering at the walls as though looking for something, probably an elevator. Then, he pointed to the far wall, nodding. “There should be a directory in that elevator.”

The elevator’s glass panels had been polished until they shone, and were held in a brass frame much the same as the revolving doors out in front. Shuuichi grimaced as he and Seiji piled in with about five other people who looked no more comfortable with the cramped quarters than he was. At least there read on the panel ‘ _Fourth Floor—Staff Offices_.’

The second floor opened on racks of sporting equipment, baseballs and mitts and bats, footballs and soccer balls and helmets and cleats; beyond Shuuichi caught sight of a few stuffed animals sitting out on a metal shelf. The third, on gleaming display cases full of the latest in phones, computers, television sets. The fourth, on a quiet hall laid down with a dark red carpet, lined with closed doors with brass placards nailed to their fronts.

Shuuichi quickly spotted a placard that indicated that the person behind the office in particular belonged to should at least prove somewhat useful. _‘Kita Hisako, Day-Shift Supervisor_.’ When he knocked, though, he got no response.

“Wouldn’t it be just about right to get to the office and find nobody’s home?” Shuuichi remarked, staring at the door, practically willing it to open.

“She could be out in the store, or in someone else’s office.” Seiji’s mouth twisted in a catlike smile. “I was under the impression that you were capable of a bit more patience than this.”

“Don’t call me—“

“Can I help you?”

Shuuichi whirled around (He took some short-lived satisfaction in seeing that Seiji had been caught off-guard as much as he had). Behind them stood a tired-looking woman with close-cropped brown hair, wearing black slacks and a dark red button-down shirt. She clutched a half-empty plastic water bottle in one hand and eyed them both with the hazy look of someone who’d not slept particularly well for a while. “Are you Kita-san?” Shuuichi asked her.

Kita nodded, her gaze passing between the two men slowly. “Yes, I am.” Suddenly, her demeanor grew more alert, her jaw going sharp with wariness. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Shuuichi plastered a smile to his face that, judging from the fact that Kita looked no less wary now than she had a moment ago, had not done its job at all. “My name is Natori Shuuichi; this is my associate, Matoba Seiji.” He gestured to Seiji, no nodded slightly at Kita, that vague half-smile of his stealing over his lips. “I’m from the Agency; I need to speak with you about one of your employees.”

The look on Kita’s face shifted from wariness to wide-eyed alarm. “P… Please come inside,” she stammered. “I don’t want to talk about this in the hall.”

Kita ushered Shuuichi and Seiji inside her office, shutting the door firmly behind her. Before Shuuichi could even open his mouth, she blurted out, “What’s this all about? D’you think one of the people working here is an android?”

The fear in her voice cut the air like the edge of a knife, but behind it, there was something else, something like… vindication? Shuuichi paused a moment, wondering if Kita had already had suspicions of her own, before taking the reader out of his pocket and scrolling to one of the photos of Akina, his smile fading fast. “Does the woman in this photo happen to resemble any of the people working here?”

Her brow furrowed deeply. As Kita took hold of the reader, she frowned, but didn’t look particularly surprised. “Y-yes, that’s Akina-san. Knew there was something weird about her,” she muttered, “the way she’s always smiling, how she never gets hungry, or tired. Except she’s got _black_ hair, not white.”

So she’d been savvy enough to change something about her appearance, then? Whether Akina knew the protocol or she’d just dyed her hair so she’d stand out a little less in a crowd, the result was the same. Shuuichi felt a momentary rush of relief at the realization that, if all went well, he wouldn’t be the one to carry out the termination, but it was momentary only. The longer this was dragged out, the more dangerous things became.

“Where is she now? I’ll need somewhere private to perform the Voight-Kampff test on her?”

“She works the candy counter on the second floor. If you go to the second floor storeroom, I’ll send her to you.”

The storeroom, illuminated only by swaying circular golden lamps, was a maze of shelves stacked high with excess inventory, boxes pressing in on each other until there wasn’t an inch of space left on the shelves. Half a dozen bags of golf clubs were propped haphazardly near the door. A closer inspection of the room revealed black plastic crates looming out of the shadows, propped up against the walls, their edges catching the scant light dully. Somewhere, an air conditioning unit rattled laboriously into life.

There was a metal table near the door, with four folding metal chairs, all lightly pocked with rust, scattered around it, that would serve Shuuichi’s purposes fine. As he set up the Voight-Kampff device, he could feel Seiji staring down at him. “Listen, Seiji,” he said, in a voice that sounded thoroughly unlike his own.

“Yes?”

“When she comes in, don’t… don’t stand too close to—“

Someone rapped lightly on the door. Shuuichi’s head snapped up; _That sure didn’t take long._ “Come in,” he called, pressing his back against the cold frame of his chair.

In walked a tall, thin black-haired woman. She wore a long-sleeved white dress patterned with red poppies, and her pale eyes shone like lamps in the gloom. Shuuichi immediately recognized her as the escaped android, black hair or no, but protocol demanded following for more reasons than simply to please the people in charge.

Akina looked at the two men with an expression of intense curiosity on her face. When her gaze settled on Seiji, who’d taken up standing closer to the table than Shuuichi would have liked, curiosity morphed into something else, a flash, almost, of recognition? Shuuichi felt cold to see it, but Seiji seemed thoroughly unruffled, meeting her gaze untroubled. After a long moment, Akina, still looking at Seiji, asked, “Kita-san said you had a test you needed to run on me?”

“Yes,” Shuuichi replied, trying to force a smile that only came out as a grimace, the corners of his mouth lopsided. “I came here to perform the Voight-Kampff test on you.” Sure would be nice if he didn’t have to state his intentions so clearly, too, but that was another protocol that did not bear breaking. “Please sit down.”

For a moment, Akina paused, startled, but then she laughed loudly, her mouth crinkling in an amused smile. “The Voight-Kampff test? Well, this shouldn’t take long,” she remarked offhandedly. She slid into a chair, smoothing down her skirt almost primly. “What were your questions…” Her mouth still twitching with humor, she stared searchingly at Shuuichi’s face, eyebrows shooting up.

“It’s Natori,” Shuuichi said shortly as he aligned the device. “Please hold still; this needed to be aligned exactly with your eyes.”

“Certainly.”

Akina fidgeted a little in her chair, seemingly having found several specks of lint to be brushed from her skirt, but after a while, Shuuichi was able to get the device to align with her eyes. “State your name.” His voice sounded unnaturally loud to his own ears.

“Tachibana Akina.”

“Date of birth?”

“March 30, 2026.”

“Preferred pronouns?”

“She, her.”

“Alright, question one: You see a man lying injured on the street. What do you do?”

Akina quirked an eyebrow. “Well, that depends, doesn’t it?”

Shuuichi met her gaze, frowning. “Depends on what?”

“Is there already someone else helping him?” Akina probed. “If he’s being attended to by a paramedic or someone like that, I certainly wouldn’t want to interfere. Doing so could kill him.”

“In that case, assume that no one is helping him. He’s injured, and you’re the only other person around. What do you do?”

Akina’s waxen face contorted momentarily before she replied, “Well, what are the extent of his injuries? If he’s just got a bit of a nosebleed, he hardly needs my help, does he? If his injuries are more serious, how did he come to be injured in the first place? If his injuries are the result of my defending myself after he attacked me, I would run away and leave him there.” She flicked a lock of hair back behind her shoulder. “But if he hadn’t attacked me first, then of course I would help him.”

Those… were all valid reasons, and Shuuichi could admit to himself that, in Akina’s place, they’d be on his mind too. But the device read her _eyes_ to get a result, not her words. That the test involved giving verbal responses to questions at all was solely for the benefit of humans who might pop a false positive. And the device read out to Shuuichi, in bold white letters, ‘BELOW AVERAGE.’ But that was only one question.

“Two: Your neighbor has been evicted from their home and has nowhere to stay. What do you do?”

The look that stole over Akina’s face was a decidedly dubious one. She tilted her head a fraction of an inch before seeming to remember that she had to keep her eyes level with the device. “What sort of relationship do I have with my neighbor? What kind of person are they?”

“That’s not relevant,” Shuuichi told her, resisting the urge to glare.

“I think it is,” Akina fired back, but when Shuuichi made no further response, she sighed, her brow creasing. “Well, Natori-san, I’d recommend them a cheap motel, if I don’t even know what kind of person they are.”

And the device read ‘BELOW AVERAGE.’

“Three: Someone has had their car break down nearby your home, and they don’t have a phone handy to call a repairman. What do you do?”

Akina said nothing. She sat very straight and very still in her chair, barely seeming even to breathe. Shuuichi locked eyes with her; at that moment, her stare grew piercing, scouring, as though she was trying to peel his skin away and pick apart his brain. _What will you do now?_

“You’ve been so good at stalling up until now,” Seiji said softly, speaking for the first time since Akina entered the room. He favored her with a cool, dispassionate smile. “Have you nothing more to say?”

No, nothing to say—Akina didn’t answer him, either. She wound a stray tendril of hair around her finger, her eyes growing wider and wider. She swallowed hard. Then, without warning, she lunged forward across the table, hands outstretched. Shuuichi tried to jump out of the way, but too late. Akina caught him in the chest, knocking him backwards to the ground; his chair and hers clattered to the floor with an ear-splitting clang.

“Shuuichi-san!” Winded, Shuuichi struggled to get back to his feet, but in a split-second, Seiji’s hand was clamped around his elbow, and he hauled Shuuichi to his feet with startling ease. “Are you alright?” Seiji stared him up and down, wide-eyed, his hand going from Shuuichi’s arm to his shoulder.

Shuuichi coughed, wincing. “I’m fine. She’d have to do worse than—where did she go?” he demanded. “Back into the store?”

“No, further into the storeroom.”

“There must be a door we missed. Come on!”

As they ran off after Akina, something heavy fell to the ground with a dull thud. Then, again, and again, reverberating against the ceiling. A door slammed shut, cracking abruptly its frame. Shuuichi spotted a sliver of pale gray light and dust motes dancing in it. There, at the far corner of the room, was a metal door, paint peeling back to reveal rust, and fallen crates scattered all around it.

A blast of sticky air thick with gasoline fumes hit Shuuichi’s face as he rushed out the door onto a creaking fire escape. A flash of white caught his eye, and there was Akina, tearing down the stairs two at a time, eventually hitting the ground and running out into an alley. Shuuichi and Seiji followed after as fast as they could, but she turned on her heel to the street beyond, and by the time they got there themselves, they saw many faces, but none of them were hers.

-0-0-0-

Over the next couple of weeks, there were several sightings of Tachibana Akina, furtive glimpses of someone believed to be her in alleyways, in crowded streets, darting between cramped stores in shopping malls. None of these sightings ever panned out, though, which honestly didn’t surprise Seiji at all. ‘Tall and black-haired’ was the most you could really say of Akina from a distance, and from a distance, ‘tall and black-haired’ did a poor job of narrowing things down. More likely someone had seen a human who resembled the android and called _that_ in.

She could be anywhere by now, could look like anyone. Seiji wondered, at times, how much longer it would be before Akina was caught, and what more could she do, unchecked, in that amount of time. But then, there were those who were simply never caught, androids who logically must have reached the end of their lives long ago, and yet had still never shown up. Akina had a little over a year and a half left, if nothing happened to her in the meantime. Would someone eventually happen on a cold corpse, eyes fixed open and limbs perfectly stiff, some life-sized doll tossed out in a deserted alley? Or would she vanish, as though she had never been at all?

 _No, neither_. _She’s not a ghost to simply vanish without a trace. If she’s still out there, she will be found_.

Seiji blinked against the bright gray sky as he stepped out of the office building and into the street. He didn’t often have occasion to visit the city during the week, but his grandfather had sent him to one of their branch offices to drop off certain files concerning the Mark 8s. Tatsuya didn’t trust their delivery to e-mail, but then, that was hardly unusual of him, where the Mark 8s were concerned.

A roll of thunder, low and grumbling, sounded overhead. Seiji sighed and took a seat at the bus stop outside. The parking garage where he’d left his car was several blocks away, and he’d forgotten his umbrella—Seiji would like to avoid getting burned, if at all possible.

Cars rolled by sluggishly, kicking up the little puddles of dingy rainwater that accumulated on the side of the road. Unusually, the sidewalks were mostly deserted, but then, there were few stores in this part of town, and it was a time of day when most would be at work or in school.

Someone sat down beside him on the bench. Seiji caught sight of a gleam of white out of the corner of his eye. He looked down and saw a white skirt patterned with red poppies, now streaked with dirt, but before he could respond, its owner pressed something hard and cylindrical to his side from under her jacket. Seiji stiffened and glared, but Akina only smiled, albeit without any humor. “Sit still.”

“Is there something I can help you with?” Seiji asked sarcastically, raising an eyebrow at her.

Akina’s smile froze. “I’ve seen you around, Matoba; I know who you are. I didn’t come here to kill you.” Though, interestingly, she chose that exact moment to jab the barrel of her gun against her ribs. “I know that if I killed you, I’d never know a moment’s peace again. But if you try anything, you _will_ regret it,” she warned, her face hardening.

Seiji eyed her coldly. “So what _do_ you want?”

“The same as what anyone wants. What you want, what your tame bounty hunter wants. I want my freedom.”

“Hmm.” Seiji pressed his lips into a thin line.

Akina tossed her head in a bitter laugh. “Of course you wouldn’t approve. But it’s true, and really, you and yours have no one but yourselves to blame.”

“And the guard you killed to get that gun,” Seiji pointed out, his mouth curling in something like a smirk, but was instead a jagged thing with too many teeth. “I suppose he only had himself to blame as well?”

At that, Akina paused, the muscles in her face growing taut. “That,” she said quietly, “that, unfortunately, proved… necessary for my escape.” Her eyes flashed. “But the past is another planet. Earlier, you had questions for me. Now, I have some for you—if, of course, you have the time to listen,” she added, mock-polite.

“All the time in the world,” Seiji replied sardonically. _Humoring her might at least give me some idea of what she plans to do next._

“Question one.” Akina’s clear, crisp voice cut the air like a razor blade. “You make a living machine and put it to work. When you make it, you give it an eye for art, not only the capacity but the inclination to appreciate color and aspect and shadow. You make your living machine love beauty, no, adore it. And you put that machine down in squalor, and tell it to live its life there. What is it to do?”

“Find beauty where it can. In the faces of those around it, for instance.”

Akina’s teeth flashed in a brief, mirthless smile. “It soon found this insufficient. Question two: You make a living machine, and make it to love music, want to hear it every day. You make it work next to turbines so loud that they’d deafen a human being in minutes, a place where it will never hear music for as long as it lives. What is it to do?”

“For the noise, put in for a pair of earplugs. As for music, it can make up songs in its head.”

“That was never enough.” Akina’s face screwed up in frustration. “Question three, Matoba—try to pay attention. You make a living machine and implant it with knowledge of literature, and put it to work somewhere it will never have occasion to read, nor access to a book. _Why_?!” she hissed. “To make it a more scintillating conversation partner for the human foreman?!”

Seiji shrugged. “Possibly. Certain personalities love having their egos stroked by their subordinates.”

“Question four.” The light that shone in Akina’s eyes was almost desperate. “Why give androids a love of the world, if you’re never going to let them into the sight of it?”

Seiji paused, saying nothing. He stared at her for a long moment, feeling… Then: “I have nothing to tell you.”

Akina sneered. “I know you don’t. You’ve likely never devoted so much as a moment’s thought to it.” The contempt faded from her face, replaced by a light, almost troubled frown. “Maybe you should think about it, though.”

“And what do you mean by _that_ , exactly?”

Her mouth twisted dubiously. “You were born on Mars, an only child. On Mars, so far away that regular correspondence is virtually impossible. So no old friends to keep in touch with, and your only family is the old man.” Her eyebrows quirked, half challenge, half query. “That’s remarkably convenient.”

“If you’re trying to leave me shaken, I should think you could find a less transparent way to do so,” Seiji said coolly. “Or shall I remind you that my Voight-Kampff results fall within normal parameters? _Unlike yours_.”

A ghost of a laugh hit the air. “But that test isn’t always reliable; we both know that! Humans get caught in the snares all the time.”

Seiji found himself looking away from her face, a split-second lapse before making eye contact again, but still noticeable, even if only to him.

“Let’s face it,” Akina went on, a strange smile lighting her lips. “If you’re human, there’s only one surefire way to prove it.” With her free hand, she rummaged in her jacket pocket and came out with a small pocket knife. “We can test it out right now, if you like.”

Seiji’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the knife. He could always make a grab for it, but there were a decidedly limited number of places on an android’s body where a stab wound could actually make a difference, and he doubted he could both get the knife and stab her before Akina could fire her gun. “I think I’ll pass,” he said evenly. “I do have a question for you, though.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. After all the questions you’ve asked me, surely you can allow me one. So tell me, if you can’t eat, what on earth were you doing working at a candy counter?”

Akina stared incredulously at him. Her mouth twisted in a soundless snarl. “This isn’t a water pistol I’m holding, Matoba. One would think you’d choose your words more carefully.”

Seiji smiled icily back at her. “One would think.”

She tossed her head and got abruptly to her feet. “See you around, Matoba,” she said as she started to walk off, stuffing her gun and her knife back into her jacket.

“And where are you going _now_?”

“Home, of course. There are things I still need to do. Thanks for your time, by the way…”

Alone, Seiji let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Then, he frowned. ‘Home?’ Akina couldn’t possibly have meant her old apartment. It had been cordoned off and put under surveillance the day he and Shuuichi found her in the department store; she must have known better than to go back there.

Suddenly, he stopped, his mouth going dry.

Unless she meant somewhere else entirely.

-0-0-0-

When Shuuichi pulled in to the parking garage at the Matoba Corporation, he found the garage nearly completely deserted and Seiji waiting for him at the door to the main office building, his eyes gleaming sharply. Without preamble, Shuuichi said, “I got your call. You really think Tachibana’s come back here?”

It seemed impossible. Forget Akina’s intentions in returning here, whatever they were. This place was a death trap for an escaped android. All the guards would know what she looked like, and while lead bullets might not be able to kill an android, they certainly could cripple one. But Seiji nodded, and Shuuichi’s heart sank. “Yes, I do. A surveillance camera caught her entering this building a little over an hour ago.”

 _Great_. “And you haven’t seen any sign of her since then.”

Seiji shook his head, his forehead briefly creasing in frustration. “No, none. The regular staff has gone home for the night, so it’s not like she has too many people she needs to avoid.”

At least that left Akina with fewer potential hostages, if she decided that that was the only way she was getting out of here alive. “So we’re searching the building for her.”

“Not the whole building. The guards are searching the third floor. You and I are searching the first and second floor. The elevators have been shut down and all the doors locked; unless she gets a master key or tries breaking a window, she’s not leaving.”

It was slow going, searching every office, closet, breakroom, bathroom for any sign of Akina. Seiji stood watch out in the hall while Shuuichi searched inside the room. He didn’t like the idea of them being separated for any length of time, especially considering Seiji was unarmed, but she could easily dart away down the hall while Shuuichi wasn’t looking, so he made no outward complaint about it.

 _She’s probably running circles around us anyways. If Tachibana’s smart enough to get in here without getting killed, she’s definitely smart enough to circumvent the locks._ Shuuichi grimaced as he searched through another empty office, bending down to check under the desk, behind the little plastic tree whose branches spread out from the corner of the room. Even with all the lights on, the room felt desaturated, shadows pressing thicker than they should have; that was how it had felt with all the rooms he had searched so far.

Well, this one was clean. And that left, what, about ninety to go? _Looks like I won’t be getting too much sleep tonight._ “Hey, Seiji,” Shuuichi said as they turned a bend in the hall, “is there any reason we aren’t looking over the surveillance feeds?”

Seiji eyed him sharply, a rather considering expression stealing over his face. “There aren’t any interior surveillance cameras here,” he said shortly.

Shuuichi gaped at him. “Are you serious? That’s a massive gap in security, right there.”

“You’d have to take it up with my grandfather.” Seiji’s voice was decidedly stiff. “He’s always refused to have interior surveillance cameras installed in any of the buildings on the grounds.”

Well, that went a long way towards explaining why the Matoba Corporation had had so many androids escape from them over the last several months, though Shuuichi had to admit, grudgingly, that it was impressive that they’d only started having problems so recently. Something about that didn’t quite sit right, though. Security here was up to snuff in every other regard, so why—

 _Click. Click. Click._ Muffled footsteps sounded from somewhere nearby. Shuuichi and Seiji stopped dead in their tracks.

Maybe twenty feet from them, an office door creaked open, almost agonizingly slowly. Akina stepped out, her stolen gun in her hand. Shuuichi barely had any time to respond before she spotted them and fired.

The gunshot was painfully, almost deafeningly loud—Shuuichi doubted it would have been any quieter if a bomb had gone off in the hall—but it flew wide of the mark, impacting harmlessly into a wall. Shuuichi drew his own weapon and fired back, the energy bolt illuminating the hallway in a ghastly glow. Akina leapt out of the line of fire and dove back into the empty office. Another gunshot followed this, missing again, but coming closer to them than Shuuichi would have liked.

They needed more cover; it was only going to be a matter of time before one of Akina’s bullets struck true. Apparently Seiji had had the same though, because he darted across the hallway to the nearest doorway, fumbling with his master key for several too-long, too-quiet seconds before finally getting the key into the lock.

Shuuichi had taken his attention off of Akina’s door. He didn’t see her leaning out of the other office for another shot. Seiji looked away from the door, his eyes darting to Shuuichi, and that was when Akina fired.

Seiji fell to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, clutching at his face and drawing uneven, rattling breaths. Akina ran off, but Shuuichi was only dimly aware of that, barely even heard the faint echo of her footsteps. He dropped to his knees at Seiji’s side, his hands trembling as he tried to pry Seiji’s away from his face. “Let me see.” Those fingers cling at skin still, hiding the wound from view. “Come _on,_ Seiji.”

It… it wasn’t bleeding. It couldn’t be _too_ bad, then, could it? It… it must have only been a grazing shot, right? Shuuichi’s stomach lurched; his heart hammered so hard that he thought it might burst. His hands scrabbled at Seiji’s, clinging at his fingers. It couldn’t be _mortal_ , right?

Shuuichi finally managed to tear Seiji’s hands away from his face, and froze.

There was indeed no blood, no torn flesh. Seiji’s hands fell away from his face and glass shards clattered to the floor, shimmering like diamonds. His face was a mask of pain and confusion. The bullet had lodged in his right eye, wreathed by slivers of glass and iridescent optic wires. The skin around the eye dangled by thin, fraying threads, exposing not tissue, but gunmetal gray wiring.

_What…_

“Get up.” A woman’s voice sounded behind him, cold and clipped. Shuuichi didn’t move, and the next thing he knew, there was a hand on his shoulder, yanking him roughly away from Seiji. “ _Now.”_

Reluctantly, Shuuichi stood, and turned to face a stone-faced guard and a gray-haired woman who pursed her lips in displeasure at the scene before her. “The president will see you now.”

-0-0-0-

Shuuichi was ushered into Matoba-san’s office. The moment the door was shut, he was at the lock, jiggling it desperately, but it was locked and wouldn’t give. “Are you so eager to leave?” Matoba-san called out behind him. “I was certain you would have some questions for me.” Shuuichi turned, slowly, away from the door, and Matoba-san was smiling the same grandfatherly smile he had shown when they first met. The hairs on the back of Shuuichi’s neck stood on end. “Please sit down.”

Shuuichi would have liked to refuse, but his legs felt like the bones had turned to jelly. He didn’t think he _could_ stay standing, not for much longer. “What’s going on?” he asked once he’d sat down, caught in Matoba-san’s piercing stare and struggling not to squirm.

“It’s a pity you had to find out like this,” Matoba-san remarked airily. “It does foul up the results quite a bit.” He waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Ah, well, such is life.”

“Matoba-san, _what_ is going on?” Shuuichi demanded. An image of broken glass flashed through his mind, memory sharp as a knife. Something hitched in his chest.

Matoba-san stared at him appraisingly for a moment, before leaning back in his chair and sighing. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now. Matoba Seiji is not a human being. He is a prototype Mark 8 android.”

“What?” Shuuichi felt like the ground had suddenly given way beneath him. In a voice that sounded entirely unlike his own, he asked, far too calmly, “What do you mean?”

Matoba-san shot him an almost pitying look. “Exactly what I said. Matoba Seiji is not human. He is a Mark 8 android.”

“He can’t be!”

“Oh? And why not?”

“He can eat. He sleeps. He gets headaches. He dreams. He has nightmares. He talks in his sleep!” Shuuichi blurted out, the words slipping from his mouth like blood from an open wound.

Matoba-san’s lips quirked in obvious amusement. Shuuichi clenched his teeth, mortified, but stared defiantly into his eyes, waiting for him to meet the challenge. “Does he now? And tell me, Natori-san, does he bleed as well?”

There had been no blood, no flesh, only shattered glass and naked wiring. Shuuichi said nothing, the words all caught in his throat.

“Ah, there you have it.” Matoba-san flashed a triumphant smile at him. “In spite of all evidence to the contrary, Seiji _is_ an android.”

Shuuichi stared numbly at him, trying at last to process the information rather than simply deny it. He thought of every moment he had spent with Seiji, tried to think if there was a single sign he’d missed because he hadn’t been looking for it, didn’t want to look for it, didn’t want to see or hear or know. And…

“So the Voight-Kampff results were faked?” Shuuichi asked dully.

What Matoba-san told him managed to shock him. “No, they weren’t.” Triumph was in his voice now. “His non-verbal reactions are a bit slow, but Seiji is perfectly capable of empathy. And before you say that such a thing is impossible, know that extensive tests were conducted, trial and error repeated ad infinitum until we got it right. It _is_ possible.”

“But that’s illegal! Why would you risk exposing him to the world? To a bounty hunter?!”

“Well, it’s a calculated risk, isn’t it? If I never let Seiji off of Corporation grounds, that would ring alarm bells. ‘Why has the president of the Matoba Corporation forbidden his grandson from leaving the corporation grounds? What has he to hide?’ Yes, the media would be all over that, and that sort of scrutiny was the last thing I wanted.” He was explaining this all as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “As for why I set him to work with you, well, that was a test. I wanted to see how long it would take a bounty hunter, someone trained specifically to pick out the minute details separating androids and humans, to figure out that Seiji was an android. And indeed, months of associating with him, apparently much more closely than I’d thought, and you never noticed a thing. Who knows how much longer it would have been, if that dratted Mark 7 hadn’t stuck a fly in the ointment?” Matoba-san rubbed tiredly at his forehead. “But none of this matters now. You know, and you have become a liability I cannot afford.”

Somehow, Shuuichi wasn’t exactly surprised.

“So you will simply fall from the sight of the world.”

-0-0-0-

These days, corporations in remote locations tended to have holding cells somewhere on site. The cells served the dual purpose of containing human miscreants until the police arrived to deal with them, and to house androids slated for termination while preparations were made. Shuuichi had never before now expected to see one of these cells, let alone but shut up inside one. Under other circumstances, he might have been able to muster some interest in the experience, in his surroundings. Not this time.

Shuuichi had learned early on in life that kicking or hitting the wall when angry never solved anything. It left him with a sore, throbbing fist or foot (Sometimes both). The wall couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t hurt, but if it showed signs of damage, he’d certainly get in trouble, and stay in trouble for a while. All the same, he found himself nearly overwhelmed by the desire to fall on old habits tonight.

 _It was right in front of me the whole time. All of it, and I completely fell for it. If I’d just gone looking for it, it would have been plain as day, but I…_ He had bought into the illusion, happily. _…But I was too gullible to look._

He paced the floor of the cell, from the cot at the back to the bars in front, running his hands through his hair spasmodically. He… he needed to find a way out. But for the life of him, Shuuichi couldn’t concentrate at all.

Then, he caught sight of movement out of the corner of his eye.

There was Seiji, sitting on the cot in the cell opposite Shuuichi’s. He wasn’t looking at Shuuichi, didn’t give even a momentary acknowledgement of his presence; only the left side of his face was visible. He was picking at a cloth daisy he’d gotten from who-knows-where, running his fingertip over the edges of the petals, only to rip one off at random, until a heap of forlorn yellow petals had gathered at his feet.

Shuuichi stared at him, eyes burning, a hard knot forming in his throat. “Must’ve been hilarious to you, wasn’t it?” he spat bitterly. Seiji didn’t respond. “All these months, never letting on, just waiting to see if I’d figure it out on my own. Hilarious, right?”

Sketchy history. Didn’t recognize common street food. Always stood with his back straight, as though his shoulders never hurt or got tired. Just… waiting.

Still, Seiji didn’t look at him. He tore a few more petals off of the daisy, _kch kch kch_ , until there were hardly any left at all. He bore the vague, disinterested look of a child with nothing better to do than rip something apart.

Shuuichi drew a ragged breath, unsure if he wanted to scream, hit something, or just break down and cry from frustration. But then, crying in pain was another habit he’d left behind long ago, when it stopped doing any good. “All this time, and you…” He trailed off. It all seemed as though it must have been one massive joke, except that, if Seiji had been a conscious participant in Matoba-san’s ‘test,’ why was he in a holding cell too? “…You didn’t know either.”

At last, Seiji gave some response, some sign that he was even aware that Shuuichi was there with him. “No,” he said shortly, glancing briefly at Shuuichi, then looking away quickly. “I didn’t.” He ripped the last petal off of the daisy, and let it float hazily to the floor with the others. He twiddled the too-green stem in his hand.

Implanting an android with false memories was blatantly illegal. The danger inherent in letting an android think, even for a moment, that it was human was too great to be borne. But… but it made sense if someone was trying to test how like to man an android could really be. After all, the trick was making sure the android thought it _was_ man.

“So… how long…”

“I have no idea. I don’t want to think about it.”

Shuuichi cast about for another question—he had so many that needed answering, but couldn’t begin to fathom how to ask them. Finally, he settled on, “What did they tell you?” How on earth would someone explain to an android with false memories that they weren’t a human being? How could someone _let_ an android think they were human in the first place, when all it would take to shatter the illusion would be to prick their finger on a pin?

Seiji’s face contorted. “What did they tell me?” He drew a quaking breath through gritted teeth, squeezed his eye shut before slowly, reluctantly opening it again. “I was born November 1, 2033, in Hellas Planitia on Mars. My parents were Matoba Kazuya and Sayaka; my father and grandfather had a falling-out before I was born, and I never knew my grandfather growing up. My grades were average—I was good at sports and math, and lousy at history even though I liked it. My parents were killed in a hotel bombing two years ago. After that, my grandfather invited me to come here and work for him. I’ve lived here ever since.”

He shot to his feet, the daisy stem falling from his hand, and turned to look at Shuuichi. The remains of his eye had been dug out of the socket, the simulated skin blasted off by the gunshot left unrepaired. The exposed wiring and gaping, empty eye socket, gunmetal gray, was sickening to look at when juxtaposed by pale skin; Shuuichi’s first impulse was to look away, but he forced himself to look Seiji in the face. “But none of that’s true, is it?” Seiji asked quietly. He pressed his lips into a tight line, his remaining eye over-bright, before going on. “I wasn’t born. I was constructed on an assembly line. I’ve never been to Mars, and I’ve never been to school. My parents never existed anywhere but in my own mind, and every emotion I ever felt for them, love, frustration…” He looked away, swallowing hard. “…Grief, was all manufactured.” He drew a deep breath, and smiled bitterly. “My life, you see, if it can be called that, has been a farce.”

Seiji pressed his back against the wall of his cell, scrubbing at his face with his hands, and was silent. He looked… smaller.

Shuuichi sank down on his cot, cradling his head in his hands. From the start, androids had seemed more human to him than he would have thought possible before becoming a bounty hunter. Just the Voight-Kampff, really, to differentiate some of them. Then, there was Seiji, who didn’t even have that to separate him. Then, there was Seiji, just as capable of anger, happiness, melancholy, and fear as any human. Just as capable of empathy. Given memories of a home and a family and a life that had turned out not to exist. Just like a human in every way, and he’d continue on like that, until the day when he just… stopped.

Suddenly, Shuuichi felt as though he’d been drenched with ice water.

“Are all the Marks 8s capable of passing the Voight-Kampff test?” Here was something a little easier to grasp upon.

“Yes.”

“And false memories?”

Seiji shut his eye tight before responding, “Yes, they all have false memories.”

“But that could shut this whole corporation down, if it ever got out,” Shuuichi pointed out, shaking his head in disbelief. Beyond that, there was the specter of hundreds, or even thousands of androids who all thought they were human. Androids who thought they were human, turned loose upon the world, until something burst the bubble. “Why would Matoba-san risk so much for this?”

“Buyers want androids more capable of passing as human should the situation demand it,” Seiji explained. “They live longer so they can work longer, and false memories make them easier to control. It’s just… It’s just good business,” he finished helplessly, his voice cracking. Then, he looked back at Shuuichi, his gaze sharpening. “He’s going to have you killed, isn’t he?”

“I… think so.”

“Right, then.” Suddenly, Seiji was all business. Distress might not have left his face, but it paled and faded. “There’s an electrical panel on the ceiling of your cell; do you see it?”

Shuuichi looked up and, sure enough, there was a small electrical panel on the ceiling. “Yeah. What is it?”

“It controls power to the holding cells; it was put in in case this part of the building ever flooded while there were people in the cells. Your cot isn’t bolted down; you should be able to reach it if you stand on it.”

The cot creaked alarmingly when Shuuichi stood on it, but it didn’t give under his weight. On the panel there were twelve buttons: the digits 0-9, ‘ENTER’ and ‘CANCEL.’ “What buttons do I press?”

“9-0-7-3-8-2-5-4-2-1. That will shut down power to the cell block; with that you can push the bars aside yourself.”

When Shuuichi punched in the numbers, all went dark in the cell block. The air conditioning duct fell silent, and there came a loud click from the top of the bars. A moment later, the lights lining the floors of the hall flickered back on, but they were all that did.

With some difficulty, Shuuichi pushed the bars away from his cell; even without being electronically held in place, they were still heavy. He started towards the door he’d been led here from, heart hammering, but he stopped when he realized Seiji wasn’t following him. “What will happen to you now?”

Standing close to the bars, his arms folded over his chest, Seiji looked away. “I don’t know. It’s possible I may be kept on in the same capacity I occupied before.” He set his jaw. “I can hope for that.”

But they both knew that wasn’t going to happen. If it was, if it even could, why had Seiji been put in a holding cell like Shuuichi, instead of sent to a technician for a replacement eye?

“You have to come with me.”

“I think you’ll find I can’t,” Seiji said, too evenly. Shuuichi reached a hand through the bars, but it could barely light on Seiji’s shoulder before Seiji slapped it away, his eye flashing.

“And why not?!” Shuuichi demanded, staring at Seiji with something very much like desperation welling up in his chest. “Seiji, listen to—“

“You escape, and take what you’ve learned back to your superiors. What happens? The Matoba Corporation spends the next year and a half in litigation, assuming it manages to avoid being shut down altogether. Your safety might not be entirely guaranteed, but you’d be much safer than you are here. If I escape, what happens to me? I think we both know the answer to that question,” Seiji said flatly.

“Then we just run, and keep running! But you can’t stay here!”

Seiji looked at him with something akin to frustration, then sighed quietly and thrust aside the bars to his cell. “I’ll make sure you get to your car safely. Beyond that, you’re on your own.” He flashed what was probably meant to be a jibing smile at Shuuichi, but it just looked strained. “I know it’s difficult, but try not to do anything rash.”

However, Shuuichi made no move to leave. “I’m not going anywhere unless you come with me.”

Something like fury sparked in Seiji’s eye. “You idiot, do you really think you can stand here all night without the guards—“

“You can act like some self-sacrificing martyr all you want—it really _doesn’t_ suit you.” Shuuichi reached forward and clasped Seiji’s shoulders in his hands. This time, Seiji didn’t push him away. “But I’m not leaving you here with them,” Shuuichi said earnestly.

Seiji paused at that, staring at him with his brow deeply knit. Shuuichi braced himself for another objection, but it never came. Without warning, he closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms tightly around Shuuichi’s back, fingernails digging into flesh. Seiji took several shallow, ragged breaths, his grip growing almost painfully tight.

“Now who isn’t thinking about the guards?” Shuuichi muttered, but he slid his arms over Seiji’s back, trying to erase any fear from his mind. He rubbed circles on Seiji’s rigid back while soft hair fell over his cheek. A few moments, they had a few moments, surely?

“It… would seem that I no longer hold any value to the Matoba Corporation,” Seiji murmured unevenly. “So… so yes, I’ll go.”

And into the night and into the future, they went.


End file.
